Kingship - Mendoza

Kingship

The Politics of Enchantment

Francis Oakley

Kingship

Kingship

The Politics of Enchantment

Francis Oakley

© 2006 by Francis Oakley

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148–5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

The right of Francis Oakley to be identified as the Author of this Work has been assertedin accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs,and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

1 2006

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Oakley, Francis.Kingship : the politics of enchantment / Francis Oakley.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-631-22695-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-631-22695-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)ISBN-13: 978-0-631-22696-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-631-22696-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Kings and rulers—History. I. Title.

JC375.O35 2006321'.6'09—dc22

2005013798

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Set in 10/12.5pt Galliardby The Running Head Limited, Cambridge, www.therunninghead.com

Printed and bound in Indiaby Replika Press Ltd

The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy,and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free

practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have metacceptable environmental accreditation standards.

For further information onBlackwell Publishing, visit our website:

www.blackwellpublishing.com

To Will, Charlotte, Ryann,Kevin, Erin, Joslyn

List of Illustrations ixSeries Editor’s Preface xiAcknowledgments xiii

Prologue: Matters of Perspective 1

1 Gate of the Gods: Archaic and Global Patterns of CosmicKingship 10

2 Royal Saviors and Shepherds: Hellenistic, Roman, Biblical,and Islamic Views of Kingship 44

3 The Eusebian Accommodation: Christian Rulership inImperial Rome, Byzantium, and Russia 68

4 The Carolingian Accommodation: Christian Rulership inthe Germanic Successor Kingdoms of Western Europe 87

5 The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Papal, Imperial, National 108

6 The Fading Nimbus: Modern Kingship and its Fate in aDisenchanted World 132

Epilogue: Survivals and Revivals 158

Notes 164Suggestions for Further Reading 183Index 186

Contents

vii

1 Japan Emperor Hirohito during his enthronement in 1928 21

2 Africa Ndop portrait of King Mishe miShyaang maMbul; ndopcarving of King Shyaam aMbul aNgoong 24

3 Maya Jupiter, Venus, and Mars align above Temple One at Tikal 30

4 Egypt The gold mask and trappings of the mummy ofTutankhamun 40

5 Byzantium The Virgin Mary and her child between the EmperorsConstantine and Justinian 82

6 The German Empire The Emperor Otto III in majesty 102

7 Great Britain The Archbishop of Canterbury crowning QueenElizabeth II, June, 1953 135

8 The Papacy Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani places the papal triplecrown on the head of Pope Paul VI, 1963 162

Illustrations

ix

History is one of many fields of knowledge. Like other fields it has twoelements: boundaries and contents. The boundaries of history first acquiredtheir modern shape in early modern Europe. They include, among otherthings, such basic principles as the assumption that time is divisible into past,present, and future; that the past can be known by means of records andremainders surviving to the present; that culture can be distinguished fromnature; that anachronism can be avoided; that subjects are different fromobjects; that human beings are capable of taking action; and that action isshaped by circumstance. Above all else, of course, they include the assump-tion that history does actually constitute a separate field of knowledge that isin fact divided from neighboring fields – not merely a hitherto neglectedcorner of some other field whose rightful owners ought ideally, and areexpected eventually, to reclaim it from the squatters now dwelling therewithout authorization and cultivate it properly with the tools of, say, animproved theology or a more subtle natural science.

A prodigious harvest has been gathered from the field bounded by thoseassumptions. Making a tentative beginning with the humanist discovery ofantiquity, gaining confidence with the enlightened critique of religion, andblossoming into full professionalization in the nineteenth century, modernhistorians have managed to turn their produce into an elementary ingredientin democratic education and a staple of cultural consumption. They haveextracted mountains of evidence from archives and turned it into bookswhose truth can be assayed by anyone who cares to follow their instructions.They have dismantled ancient legends that had been handed down throughthe ages and laid them to rest in modern libraries. They have emancipatedthe study of the past from prophecy, apocalypticism, and other providentialexplications of the future. Pronouncements on the past command respect no

Series Editor’s Preface

xi

longer unless they have been authenticated by reference to documents.Myths and superstitions have given way to knowledge of unprecedenteddepth, precision, and extent. Compared to what we read in older books, thebooks of history today are veritable miracles of comprehension, exactitude,and impartiality.

Success, however, has its price. None of the assumptions defining themodern practices of history are self-evidently true. The more they areobeyed, the less it seems they can be trusted. Having probed the realm ofculture to its frontiers, we cannot find the boundary by which it is supposedto be divided from the empire of nature. Having raised our standards ofobjectivity to glorious heights, we are afflicted with vertiginous attacks of rel-ativity. Having mined the archives to rock bottom, we find that the ores turnout to yield no meaning without amalgamation. And having religiouslyobserved the boundary between the present and the past, we find that thepast does not live in the records but in our imagination. The boundaries ofhistory have been worn down; the field is lying open to erosion.

The books in this series are meant to point a way out of that predicament.The authors come from different disciplines, all of them specialists in onesubject or another. They do not proceed alike. Some deal with subjects strad-dling familiar boundaries – chronological, geographical, and conceptual.Some focus on the boundaries themselves. Some bring new subjects intoview. Some view old subjects from a new perspective. But all of them share aconcern that our present understanding of history needs to be reconfiguredif it is not to turn into a mere product of the past that it is seeking to explain.They are convinced that the past does have a meaning for the present thattranscends the interests of specialists. And they are determined to keep thatmeaning within reach by writing good short books for non-specialists andspecialists alike.

Constantin FasoltUniversity of Chicago

Series Editor’s Preface

xii

When writing a wide-ranging essay of this type one’s indebtednesses tendinevitably to exceed one’s ability to recognize, let alone acknowledge, them.But some debts are clear. Let me convey my appreciation, then, to thefollowing: to Tessa Harvey, Blackwells Publisher, and Constantin Fasolt,general editor of the “New Perspectives on the Past” series, for inviting meto undertake the project and for their warm encouragement and support as Igrappled with the challenges it entailed; to the generations of fine studentswhom I have been privileged to teach here at Williams College in my semi-nars and tutorials on medieval political thought, and whose insight, tenacity,and good cheer as they wrestled with Eusebius, Augustine, the canonists,John of Paris, the conciliarists, Marsiglio of Padua, and the like never failedto inspire me; to my colleagues Bill Darrow and Bill Wagner, of the Religionand History departments respectively, for their kindness in casting an experteye on some of these pages, and to my other colleagues in the weekly fellows’seminar at the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences withwhom I was able to share drafts of some of the following chapters and whoalso aided me with their criticism and advice; finally, and yet once more, toDonna Chenail and her fine staff in our faculty secretarial office for theircharacteristically prompt and accurate work in preparing the manuscript forthe press. It is to my grandchildren that the book is dedicated, and withmuch love. They bring joy to an old historian’s heart.

F.O.Williamstown, MassachusettsJuly, 2005

Acknowledgments

xiii

To establish the connections, in principle and in detail, directly or mediately,between politics and eternity is a project that has never been without its followers.. . . Probably there has been no theory of the nature of the world, of the activity ofman, of the destiny of mankind, no theology or cosmology, perhaps even no meta-physics, that has not sought a reflection of itself in the mirror of politicalphilosophy, certainly there has been no fully considered politics that has notlooked for its reflection in eternity.

Michael Oakeshott1

“That kings are sacred” has been said to be “an anthropological and histori-cal truism,”2 and kingship and its embedment in the sacred is unquestionablya topic that beguiles. But the enormity of the challenge involved in anyattempt to come to terms with it on a global scale is not to be gainsaid. Andespecially so if one is trying to do so within the confines of a brief interpreta-tive essay. For that is my endeavor. It calls, then, for a preliminary exercise inintellectual throat-clearing. Or, put differently, and imagining the topic asone riding elusively at anchor in a well-protected historiographic safe-harbor,it is not one to be approached without attempting first some methodologicaland metahistorical minesweeping, both definitional and perspectival.

So far as definitions go, the overlapping meanings of three words must beteased apart. The first, monocracy, not quite an archaism but rarely usedtoday in English and (following here the Oxford English Dictionary) denot-ing simply “government by a single person” or “autocracy.” The second,monarchy, denoting “undivided rule by a single person, sole rule or sover-eignty,” or, more narrowly (and more recently) rule by “a sovereign havingthe title of king, queen, emperor, or empress, or the equivalent of one ofthose.” The third, kingship, denoting “the office and dignity of a king . . . therule of a king; monarchical government,” with a king being defined as a

PrologueMatters of Perspective

1

“male sovereign ruler of an independent state, whose position is either purelyhereditary, or hereditary under certain legal conditions, or, if elective, is con-sidered to . . . [possess] . . . the same attributes and rank as those of a (purelyor partly) hereditary ruler.”

It is possible, by assimilating monarchy to monocracy, to distinguish fairlysharply between monarchy and kingship. This is the tack taken by RogerMousnier, who uses monarch to refer to “any man who exercises the supremepower of decision in its fullness . . . whatever his legal title may be.” Hedeploys it, therefore, as a category capable of embracing the “tyrants” ofGreek antiquity (seventh–sixth century BCE), the “dictators” of republicanRome, the shoguns of Tokugawa Japan (despite the contemporaneous exis-tence of an emperor), as well as such modern dictatorial leaders as Mussolini(despite the contemporaneous existence of an Italian king), Hitler, Stalin, andFranco, and even “at certain moments” the presidential leadership of Charlesde Gaulle. Kingship (royauté) he treats as a distinct and less inclusive categoryon the grounds that the king, while “in principle a monarch,” “possesses alegitimate, reputable power instituted by consent, recognized by custom” andmediated by “organized dynastic inheritance.”3

That is not the definitional approach I propose to take. In contemporaryEnglish usage monarch has come, in effect, to be a synonym for king orregnant queen (it has the advantage of not being gender specific), and, thatbeing so, Mousnier’s proposed distinction does more to confuse than toclarify. Monarchy, then, I will take to be a category identical with that ofkingship/queenship and one, further, that embraces the office of those rulersof large territories or of a number of peoples or subordinate kingdoms whomwe have been accustomed to calling emperors, or whose titles (Roman imper-ator from the time of Caesar Augustus, Byzantine basileus, Russian tsar,German Kaiser, Chinese huang-di, Japanese tenno- heika) are customarilyrendered in English as emperor.

It is not only definitional tactic, however, that calls for comment. So, too,does the very choice of devoting a book to kingship. After all, if we excludefrom purview those contemporary African kings whose titles no longerconfer upon them any formal political role or standing and who are, in effectand at law, private citizens of their respective states, and if we limit our focusto the 191 states around the world whose independent standing has beenrecognized by the extension to them of membership in the United Nations,only a mere handful today possess monarchical regimes of any sort. And mostof the monarchs involved are constitutional monarchs, reigning rather thanruling, serving as essentially formal heads of state charged with representingthe nation to the world at large and with the performance of ceremonialduties. Regimes in the bulk of the free-standing states of the early twenty-first

Prologue

2

century range instead from the non-monarchical but authoritarian, via thenon-democratic but still constitutionalist or quasi-constitutionalist, all theway to the liberal democratic forms pioneered in North America and north-west Europe. If one aspired to identify the constitutional wave of the future,kingship would hardly come to mind, whereas one might be able to mount areasonably persuasive case for democracy. It is true that in 1970 there wereprobably no more than 30 democracies worldwide. By 2001, however, thatnumber may even have quadrupled. As a result, we are beginning toencounter in the press the casual attribution of something approaching amanifest political destiny to the forms of liberal democracy that have tri-umphed in the West. We are also hearing expressions of hope that similargovernmental forms might prevail even in societies still bereft of effectiveconstitutional mechanisms capable of preventing the abuse of executivepower by measures short of force. But if our ears now ring to the clamor ofvoices in high places calling for the planting of democratic ideals in new (andsometimes improbable) settings across the world, we would do well to bringto the evaluation of such calls the hard-won measure of perspective affordedby the tragic history of the past century, and, beyond that, by the longercourse of world history.

In the first place, it is surely too soon to put out of mind the harsh lessonsto be learned from the apocalyptic rigors of twentieth-century political life –not only in the world at large but also in old European countries which hadalready logged considerable mileage with liberal democratic institutions. Atthe start of that century it was easy enough for progressive historians to takeit for granted that the established course of history would continue to movethe world naturally towards the realization of a governmental norm thatwould be essentially constitutionalist. To their more chastened successors atthe end of the century, however, that degree of confidence was no longeravailable. The flowering in the first half of the century, and in the very heart-land of Europe, of totalitarian despotisms of the most squalid type, the laterfailure in so many parts of the decolonized world of the newly-minted,Western-style constitutional forms so breezily bequeathed to them by theirerstwhile imperial masters, the mounting challenges confronted by the coun-tries of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Latin America as they attempted(with varying degrees of conviction) to consolidate liberal democraticregimes and to create the institutions and practices of a viable civil society –such bracing realities scarcely encourage one to take at all for granted theflowering on the world-historical scene of constitutionalism itself, let alonethe growth of that more exotic plant that we call “liberal democracy.”

Moreover, invoking in the second place the longer world-historicalrecord, it would appear to be the case that the classical republican tradition in

Prologue

3

general, and the Athenian achievement of the fifth and fourth centuries BCEin particular, have together contrived to cast so long a shadow over ourWestern habits of thinking about the political past as almost to blind us toone fundamental and really quite startling fact. Namely, that for several mil-lennia at least, it has been kingship and not more consensual governmentalforms that has dominated the institutional landscape of what we today wouldcall political life. For that certainly appears to have been the case from thetime of the “Neolithic revolution” (c.8000–c.5000 BCE), marked by the riseto prominence of agricultural modes of food production, all the way down tothe acceleration in the nineteenth century of the Industrial Revolution andthe concomitant shift of a growing percentage of the world’s population intoessentially urban modes of occupation.

“Tyranny is the normal pattern of human government,” Adlai Stevensonis reputed once to have said. And the claim is not an implausible one. Butsubstitute for “tyranny” the words “kingship” or “monarchy” and the plausi-ble hardens into the indubitable. In terms, that is to say, of its antiquity, itsubiquity, its wholly extraordinary staying power, the institution of kingshipcan lay strong claim to having been the most common form of governmentknown, world-wide, to man. Consigned thereby to merely provincial status(world-historically speaking) are the consensual, representative, republican,and democratic forms that bulk so large on our contemporary political land-scape, and to which those of us concerned with political philosophy and itshistory have tended to devote by far the greater part of our attention.

That being so, kingship and what it involved or presupposed, ideologicallyspeaking, clearly deserves a far greater measure of attention than it has in factreceived. Certainly, it warrants a degree of scrutiny at least commensuratewith that lavished, since the Renaissance, so obsessively and misleadinglyupon the classical polis or city-state. What should equally not be taken forgranted, moreover, and what calls with equal urgency for historical illumina-tion, is the eventual marginalization of kingship in the modern Westernworld, as well as its parallel decline in the world at large as that world has pro-gressively been drawn into the disenchanting orbit described by the corrosiveforces of Westernizing modernization. Nor should we ignore, even morefundamentally, the dramatic collapse of – or drainage of legitimacy from – theideological pattern that in one form or another had for long millennia sus-tained that monarchical institution. For in terms at least of its ubiquity andlongevity, that ideology can lay strong claim to having been nothing less thanthe political commonsense of humankind. And, like the institution of kingshipitself, that commonsense turns out to have been deeply embedded in thesacred and thoroughly informed by it.

Such thoughts, I recognize, are fated to sit uneasily with what has long

Prologue

4

since come to function, for those interested in political philosophy and itshistory, as a sort of constitutive narrative of the course of Western politicalthinking. No more than implicit, that narrative has served nonetheless todetermine the periods to which most attention has characteristically been paid(classical Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and Europe of the sev-enteenth to twentieth centuries), to foreground the texts on which studentshave habitually been encouraged to focus (Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli,the great contract theorists from Hobbes to Kant, the nineteenth-centuryUtilitarians, and so on), and to frame the interpretative perspective fromwhich those texts have usually been understood.

In that formative narrative, it need hardly be emphasized, the institutionof kingship and the element of sacrality attaching so persistently to it getpretty short shrift. For political philosophers at least, and the contributionsof anthropologically and historically inclined specialists notwithstanding, lateantique and medieval notions of sacral kingship have yet to find a place underthe bright lights of center stage. Nor, until recent years, have the theories ofdivine right advanced in the seventeenth century by such thinkers as James Iof England, Sir Robert Filmer, and Bishop Bossuet fared all that much better.So little so, indeed, that having cited the remark of a contemporary that“never has there been a doctrine better written against than the divine rightof kings,” John Neville Figgis a century ago was moved tartly to observe that“those, who have exhausted their powers of satire in pouring scorn upon thetheory, have commonly been at little pains to understand it.”4

One of the reasons for this, I would suggest, is that we tend instinctively totake the predominantly secular nature of our modern political life as some-thing natural to humankind, an unquestionable norm towards which allsocieties, whatever their history, may properly be expected to tend. From thatpoint of view, of course, what constitutes grounds for puzzlement and callsfor explanation, is not the emergence on the world-historical scene of thatfamiliar secular norm, but rather the persistence on into the present of soci-eties to which the distinction between the religious and the political hascontrived somehow to remain stubbornly alien. And yet, as GiambattistaVico, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and J.S. Mill all famously suggested, and as thebeleaguered Muslim world today continues plaintively to insist, it is not theinterpenetration in public life of what we in the West have become accus-tomed to classify as the “political” and the “religious” that needs explaining,but, rather, the novel Western distinction between the two, and the concomi-tant insertion into public discourse of a political vocabulary that takes such adistinction simply for granted.

Unmoved, however, by such demurrals, and unmindful, it seems, of thefindings of modern classicists, anthropologists, and students of archaic and

Prologue

5

comparative religion, those whose interests focus tightly on political phil-osophy and its history still resonate, by and large, to older scholarly frequen-cies. In their writings, that is to say, one catches distinct echoes of the viewsso dear to the German and English Hellenists of the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries. Peering eagerly into the mists of the classical past, thosepioneering Hellenists had been persistently prone, with a glad if often over-hasty recognition, to discerning in the political life of the classical Greek polisand in the writings of the Greek political philosophers, the looming outlinesof their own cherished ideals.5 And, “modern political thought and anxieties. . . [being] . . . brought to bear on the Athenian democratic experience,” thepolitical ideals the Hellenists believed themselves to have encountered in thatexperience understandably took on a predominantly secular cast.6

Hence the perspective so deeply encrypted in our histories of politicalthought as to have become almost subliminal. In accord with that perspec-tive some sort of fundamental continuity is assumed to exist between themodes of political thinking characteristic of the modern and those character-istic of the classical world, both periods being taken to be committed to thesort of natural and secular modes of rational explanation appropriate to trulypolitical thinking. In contrast, what is seen as standing out in the history ofWestern political thinking is the medieval period. It is seen, in effect, as con-stituting something of an exception, as a sacralizing deviation from thenorm, a period during which the natural categories of political philosophy aswe know it were pushed to one side by motifs of supernatural bent. Such, forexample, was the perspective embedded in the late Walter Ullmann’sapproach to the history of political thought, which was taken, accordingly, topossess a secular–religious–secular rhythm, with the medieval religious phasebeing the one that needed explaining.7 Nor was Ullmann alone among histo-rians of political thought in adhering to that point of view. Thus we hearabout “the essentially secular unity of life in the classical age,” and (after itsdecline) “the Hellenistic propensity for introducing the supernatural intopolitics.” We are reminded that Christianity made “purely political thoughtimpossible,” and that “the peculiar problem of Church and State,” whichChristianity introduced, involved “the greatest perturbation which has everdrawn men’s thoughts about the state out of their proper political orbit.” Weare even assured, long years of specialized work in other fields to the con-trary, that “Medieval Europe offers for the first time in history the somewhatparadoxical spectacle of a society trying to organize itself politically on thebasis of a spiritual framework,” or, again, that it was only with the collapse ofthe medieval “ideal of a Christian Commonwealth” that there occurred “areturn to a more purely political conception of the State.”8

Clear enough, I suppose. But that perspective I have come over the years

Prologue

6

to view as a fundamentally flawed one. The historical “rhythm” I detect inthe ebb and flow of ideas is not a secular–religious–secular one, but, rather,religious–religious–secular. Almost a century and a half ago, writing evenbefore anthropology and sociology had emerged as formal academic disci-plines and in a compelling evocation of the centrality of religion to the life ofthe ancient city state, Greek no less than Roman, Fustel de Coulanges warnedhis own contemporaries of the ever-present danger of anachronism, of histor-ical narcissism, of finding their own attitudes reflected all too readily in thoseof ancient peoples whose characteristic modes of thought were in realityfundamentally alien to theirs. Since he wrote, moreover, the findings of theclassicists, the cultural anthropologists, the students of archaic and compara-tive religion have converged in such a way as to confirm the precocity of hisvision and to make clear that the transition from the archaic and classical tothe Christian outlook was a shift not so much from a secular to a religiousviewpoint as from one ancient and widespread mode of religious conscious-ness to another and radically different one.9 And, as we shall see, the samewas to be true of the later transition in Western Europe from the world ofCeltic and Germanic paganism to that of early medieval Christianity.

Once this is understood it is no longer, of course, the religious nature ofmedieval political thinking that cries out for explanation but, rather, thedegree to which it called the age-old pattern of regal sacrality into question,as also the subsequent (if gradual) emergence in the modern era of theuniquely secularized political vision that has so succeeded in shaping thecommonsense of the modern Western world that we are persistentlytempted, even at the cost of rampant anachronism, to see it as somethinggrounded in the very nature of humankind. But historians being, as EricHobsbawm once remarked, “the professional remembrancers of what theirfellow citizens wish to forget,” it is properly their task to deliver us from suchdelusions. And I would suggest that an attempt to grasp the significanceattaching to the early emergence, global reach, and extraordinary longevityof the institution of sacral kingship and of the ideological pattern that sus-tained it is not a bad place to make a start on that process of deliverance.

Kingship, as we shall see, emerged from an “archaic” mentality that appearsto have been thoroughly monistic, to have perceived no impermeable barrierbetween the human and divine, to have intuited the divine as immanent in thecyclic rhythms of the natural world and civil society as somehow enmeshed inthose natural processes, and to have viewed its primary function, therefore, asa fundamentally religious one, involving the preservation of the cosmic orderand the “harmonious integration” of human beings with the natural world.

The ancient kings, as a result, and their analogues later on across the globe,were regarded as sacred figures – often priestly, sometimes divine – and forms

Prologue

7

of sacral kingship, with all that they presupposed and entailed, have well beendescribed as together constituting “the archetypal pattern of the archaicculture which underlies all the most ancient civilizations of the world.”10

Nowhere were the lineaments of that archetypal pattern more strikinglyevident than in ancient Egypt, where the Pharaoh was regarded as a godincarnate whose task it was to ensure the cyclic rhythm of the seasons, toguarantee the fertility of the land, and to secure the prevention of any dis-harmony between human society and what (reaching instinctively andmisleadingly for a word that did not make its appearance until well into theChristian era) we are tempted to call the supernatural forces. Egypt was anextreme case, but similar prerogatives were claimed in greater or lesser degreeby the other sacral monarchs of the ancient Near East. Via the HellenisticEmpire of Alexander the Great and its successor states, moreover, the ideol-ogy undergirding such monarchies was to exert a profound influence over thepolitical thinking of the late classical world, Roman as well as Greek, and itwas able to do so because it came not as an alien heterodoxy but as a return toa way of thinking whose ideologically underpinnings had survived the longcenturies of republican rule and had never been fully dismantled.

If that dismantling was, indeed, eventually to take place, it was to do somuch later, amid the religious and civil wars, political revolutions, scientific,commercial, and industrial developments that were to characterize themodern European centuries. Many complexly interrelated factors con-tributed, of course, to that destabilizing process – not least among them theundermining of the confessional state by the stubborn growth of religiouspluralism, the secularizing thrust of scientific reason and technologicalprogress, the powerfully transformative impact of economic and bureaucraticrationalization. But while in no way minimizing the importance of suchdevelopments it will be my purpose to focus on a factor that was more funda-mental, more enduring, more gradual in its working and more corrosive in itsultimate impact. That factor constituted what amounted, in effect, to a neces-sary condition in the absence of which the contours of our political life todaywould have been unimaginably different. And what was it? Nothing other(perhaps counter-intuitively) than a religious one, the disturbing impact uponarchaic and Hellenic modes of thought of the singular conception of thedivine nature that was basic to Judaic, Christian, and Muslim belief.

Involved in that belief was a restriction of the meaning of the divine in amanner that would have been no less incomprehensible to the ancients than isthe archaic pattern of thought to us. If we ourselves find that pattern so hardto grasp today, we would do well to remember that that is the case preciselybecause our very idea of what it is to be divine has been radically reshaped bylong centuries of Judaic, Christian, and Muslim thinking with its obdurate

Prologue

8

insistence on the unity, omnipotence, and transcendence of God, centuriesduring which the meanings ascribed to such words as god, divine, religious andso on have, by archaic standards, been narrowed down to a degree borderingon the eccentric. In shattering the archaic sense of the divine as a continuumrunning through the worlds of nature and society, the dominant belief pat-terns characteristic of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam undercut also (andtherefore) the very ontological underpinnings for archaic and worldwide pat-terns of sacral kingship. In so doing, they exposed the very institution ofkingship to a slow but persistent desacralizing, demystifying, and (ultimately)delegitimizing process, one that such later European attempts at accommoda-tion with the past as the early modern divine-right theory proved powerless inthe end to halt.

If these are admittedly large claims, they are not made without delibera-tion. They presuppose and stem from a bracing effort to approach and judgethe European and Western political experience from the outside as well asfrom the inside, and to see it, especially, from the broader perspective affordedby a reflective encounter with the millennial unfolding of universal or worldhistory. And that encounter, I should acknowledge, has been very much con-ditioned by one of the intuitions central to the comparative civilizationalthinking of Max Weber, the great pioneer of historical sociology, as well as bythe subsequent elaboration of that intuition by such others as Peter Berger,Marcel Gauchet, and Gianni Vattimo.11 Our characteristically Western modesof life and thought, Weber repeatedly insisted, are not simply to be taken forgranted. However numbingly familiar they may well be to us today, they arefar from representing any natural or inevitable culmination towards which allcivilizations strive or have striven. They represent, instead, only one very par-ticular line of development, one possibility out of several radically differentones. To appreciate that crucial fact it is necessary for us to try to envisagethem as they might appear to alien eyes. Once we make that effort, succeed inraising our heads high enough to be able to peer out over the parapet of ourown particular cultural trench and to engage the multiple histories of thelarger world that stretches out endlessly beyond, we are inevitably led withWeber to ponder the odd concatenation of circumstances that came to deter-mine the civilizational trajectory that has made us what we are. To such aneffort, then, focusing specifically on what we are accustomed to classifyingunder the category of the political, it is time now to turn.

Prologue

9

The roots of the institution of kingship reach so deeply into the past thatthey are lost to us in the shadows of prehistory. Historians have sometimesspeculated that some of those roots might extend even into the hunting andgathering cultures of the late Paleolithic era, to the powers accruing overcountless generations to wonder-working shamans and to the heads of clansor lineages. It is doubtless conceivable that such proto-royal figures may haveemerged in the centuries prior to the Neolithic invention of agriculture. Andit is certainly the case that a dwindling monarchical cohort has lingered oninto the increasingly urbanized and industrialized world of the late twentiethand early twenty-first centuries. But historiographic prudence suggests thatone might be wise to rest content with the observation that kingship enjoyedwhat was to be its heyday during the long millennia stretching from “theNeolithic revolution” and the spread of pastoral and agrarian modes of sub-sistence around the eastern Mediterranean (c.8000–c.5000 BCE) down tothe late eighteenth-century onset of the Industrial Revolution and the accel-erating shift of a growing segment of the world’s population from the landand into essentially urbanized modes of occupation.

Kingship: Ubiquity, Longevity, Sacrality

Certainly, by the beginning of the third millennium BCE when, with theinvention of writing, the historiographic shadows begin finally to lift, we findthat kingship had already established itself in the ancient Near East. It haddone so along the Nile valley in Egypt and in the Tigris and Euphrates basinin Mesopotamia, as well as in the flatlands that stretched between them. If inEgypt society appears always to have been organized along monarchical lines,in Mesopotamia the Sumerian kingship was preceded by more broadly partic-

1Gate of the Gods

Archaic and Global Patternsof Cosmic Kingship

10

ipatory forms of governance centered on temples and sanctuaries. But there,too, it soon became the universally dominant system of government. As such,it was to leave its imprint also on the modes of rulership characteristic else-where in the ancient Near East and in the lands bordering on the easternMediterranean – on the Syrian, Canaanite, and Minoan kingships of the mid-third to mid-second millennia BCE, as well as on the types of kingship to befound in Crete and Greece during the Mycenaean era (c.1600–c.1100 BCE).By the latter period, altogether independently and at the other end of theworld, kingship had made its appearance on the Chinese mainland. It haddone so with the establishment of the Shang dynasty (c.1500–1027 BCE),and it was destined to attain its classic shape a thousand years later during theCh’in and Han periods (221 BCE–222 CE). The following centuries saw itsappearance and consolidation also in Japan, Korea, Polynesia, and central,south, and south-east Asia, in most parts of which it was fated to persist downinto the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. During the same era, thesame was to be true of the Christian kings of western, central, and easternEurope, successors alike of the late Roman emperors and of the Celtic andGermanic kings of the pre-Christian era. And across the Atlantic, during thecenturies traditionally labeled in Eurocentric historiography as late antique,medieval, and early modern, the lands of Mesoamerica and South Americawitnessed the wholly independent emergence of the extraordinary Olmec,Maya, Toltec, Aztec, and Inca monarchies. Similarly, the “medieval” and sub-sequent centuries down to the twentieth were punctuated in sub-SaharanAfrica by the rise, persistence, or fall of a myriad of kingdoms, great and small,from that of the Shilluk in the north to that of Swaziland in the south, orthose of Benin and Yorubaland in the west, to the kingdoms that flourished tothe east in Tanzania and Uganda.

On the world-historical stage, then, the career of kingship as a form ofgovernment has certainly been characterized by ubiquity and longevity. Butit has been distinguished also by its sheer variety. Variety, that is to say, bothin the shapes it has assumed and in the functions and responsibilities withwhich it has characteristically been burdened. If in many instances, rangingfrom the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt or the Inca rulers of fifteenth- andsixteenth-century Peru to the French and English monarchs of early modernEurope or some of the African rulers of the same period, kingship involvedthe full panoply of governing roles – administrative, military, judicial, eco-nomic, religious, in others the role was a much more limited, focused, orspecialized one.

At one end of the spectrum, and reflecting the turbulent conditions pre-vailing in this or that region, the emphasis lay heavily on the king’s militaryrole as lord of hosts or leader in war. This was true of kings as far separated by

Gate of the Gods

11

time and space as the Mycenaean and Homeric kings of ancient Greece, theHebrew kings of the early first millennium BCE, the Germanic kings of earlymedieval western Europe, the early Inca kings of South America, and thewarrior Bemba kings who, during the eighteenth century and much of thenineteenth, carved out by conquest and overawed by their military prowesssomething of an empire in Tanganyika.

At the other end of the spectrum, however, one encounters no difficulty inidentifying a host of kingships, dispersed equally widely in space and time, towhich hardly any remnant of what we today would call “political” powerattaches, though they do tend to be possessed of (or burdened with) exten-sive ceremonial or ritual functions. For European historians the classicinstance of this type of kingship is to be found in the “do-nothing” Frankishmonarchs of the Merovingian dynasty who, from 687, at least, to 751 CE,characteristically stood to one side as recognized bearers of the mana of royallegitimacy, while the actual power of the kingship was wielded by the suc-cessive Carolingian “mayors of the palace.” And if, in the end, the lattersucceeded in appropriating the mantle of legitimacy and making themselveskings of the Franks, they were not able to do so without some difficulty. Onlya little less familiar is the situation at the other end of the world in Japanwhere, whatever one’s judgment on the earlier centuries, from the late twelfthcentury onwards under first the Kamikura and then the Tokugawa shogunate,the real governing power resided with the generalissimos or “shoguns” head-quartered eventually at Edo (Tokyo). During those centuries, while deferredto as the theoretical source of the shogun’s authority, the emperors remainednonetheless secluded in the imperial capital of Kyoto, cut off from directcontact with the daimyo or provincial nobility, limited in their official activi-ties to the performance of traditional ritual functions, bereft themselves ofmilitary power, and “protected” instead by a garrison under the command ofa military governor responsible directly to the shogun.

These two cases, however, are simply the most familiar among a wholeseries of instances worldwide of kings who, whatever the prominence ofthe symbolic role they played in their respective kingdoms, were (or, acrosstime, had become) well-nigh powerless in what we today would recognize asreal political terms. Courtesy of Christopher Marlowe’s “mighty line” andhis pioneering play Tamberlaine the Great, Timur, the fourteenth-centuryupstart conqueror of central Eurasia and a good deal of the Near and MiddleEast, is a name that has reverberated down the centuries. But we should notmiss the fact that the sweeping powers he wielded were those of a shogun-like substitute for a long-forgotten puppet, a direct descendant of the greatChingis Khan, who actually bore the title of king (khan) of Persia. Similarinstances of do-nothing (or seemingly do-nothing) kings are to be found at

Gate of the Gods

12

times and in places as widely separated one from another as the eighth-century (CE) Kingdom of Axum (in Ethiopia), or the nineteenth-centurySouth Pacific island kingdom of Tonga, or the tenth-century king of theVolga Bulgars whose feet were not permitted to touch the ground and whoseduties had to be discharged by a viceregal deputy.1 More generally, focusingon the traditional Balinese kingdoms of the late nineteenth century, CliffordGeertz has painted an arresting picture of what he calls the “theatre state,”involving an essentially expressive form of kingship in which “power servedpomp, not pomp power,” and in which “mass ritual was not a device to shoreup the state, but rather the state, even in its final gasp, was a device for theenactment of mass ritual.”2

Unless one recognizes the centrality of the sacred to the archaic forms ofkingship, wherever and in whatever historical era one encounters them, it willbe impossible to make much sense of such singular institutional phenomena.Nor will it be any easier to come to terms with so many other arresting paral-lelisms that one finds connected with the institution of kingship in parts ofthe world and periods of history so widely separated by place and time fromone another as to preclude explanation in terms of diffusion outward fromsome central point of origination. Thus, for example, the ritual slaying ofkings (or substitute figures) in the aftermath of bad harvests or if (or before)they had lost their vigor and become weak is evidenced not only in ancientAssyria and, later on, in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in Europe among theCeltic and Scandinavian peoples. Or from Tonga and Africa to India, Nepal,ancient Sparta and pre-Christian Germany, the archaic institution of dualkingship, with the two royal partners affiliated with different divinities andcharged with different functions and cultic responsibilities. Or, yet again, thecommonplace linkage of kings with the sun-god and, more generally, theirassociation with sun symbolism. In this respect, Louis XIV’s self-portrayal asle roi soleil, and the sun symbolism permeating the iconographical program athis palace of Versailles, and the Roman emperor’s adoption of sol invictus(the name of the invincible sun-god) as a title are simply instances from clas-sical and European history of a phenomenon that crops up again and again insettings as disparate as Japan, India, Persia, Mesoamerica, Hellenistic Greece,and, quintessentially, of course, ancient Egypt where the Pharaoh came tobear the title of “Son of Ré” (the sun-god). It was common in many parts ofthe world for kings to be conceived of as bearers of light, suns who rose overand with their beneficent beams illuminated their realms. Their royal regaliahad similarly cosmic associations – the throne with the cosmic mountainas axial center of the universe, the mace or scepter with the thunderbolt,the crown with the very sun itself. And the rooting of kingship in such formsof cosmic religiosity found further reflections in practices that we tend to

Gate of the Gods

13

misconstrue because we see them as transparent matter-of-fact gesturesdevoid of any connotation that could readily be labeled as “religious.”

Thus, to take a commonplace example, scholars like Chadwick, Schlesinger,and Wallace-Hadrill have taken the old Germanic practice of initiating a kingby raising him up on a shield as simply reflecting the origin of such kings intheir election as military leaders by their armed followers. But it turns out thatthe Germanic practice was not an isolated one and other instances suggest(perhaps counter-intuitively) that it may well have been grounded in the sacralsphere. At his coronation, the Byzantine emperor, too, was lifted up on ashield and that practice was still being interpreted in sacral terms as late as thethirteenth century, for it was understood as involving his ascension as a “greatsun” to the heavens, the (star-studded) shield being taken to symbolize thecosmos and the emperor being viewed as the cosmocrator.3 A certain paral-lelism to this may be detected in the royal accession ceremony indigenousto the Mongol and Turkic peoples of central and north-east Asia (and passedon, for a while, to China itself). For there, too, kings (khan, khagan) wereviewed as making a symbolic ascent to the heavens when, at their accession,they were solemnly raised up on a black felt carpet by seven dignatories. Allsuch arcane practices point insistently, of course, to the degree to which whatwe would call the state was conceived in some sense as an “embodiment of thecosmic totality,” and the institution of kingship itself was embedded in one orother species of the cosmic religiosity that for long millennia constitutedsomething approximating the religio-political commonsense of humankind. Itwas the cosmic nature of that religiosity that determined the cosmic characterof kingship. It was the source from which the latter drew its ideological suste-nance. And with its fate the fate of kingship was destined to be inextricablyentangled.

It is time, then, without making any impossible attempt to trace all theintricate variations evident in its multiple manifestations or, indeed, to signalthe areas of greatest uncertainty about it,4 to map out the dominant con-tours, at least, of that mysterious but beckoning ideological landscape.

Cosmic Religiosity and the Sacral Kingship

The cartography of the mind is an endeavor fraught inevitably with challenge.And those challenges grow understandably more severe when the mind inquestion is one so frustratingly remote from us today. Remote not necessarilyin time (though, for shorthand purposes, I will use the terms “premodern,”“primitive,” or “archaic” to denote it) for variants of the cosmic religiositypersisted in some parts of the world right down into the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries. Remote, instead, in its distance from the modalities of thought

Gate of the Gods

14

long since habitual to those of us nurtured, intellectually speaking, in the dis-enchanted cradle of Westernizing modernity.

In contrast with those modalities of thought, the “primitive,” “archaic,”or “premodern” mentality characteristically attempts to penetrate theencompassing mystery of being along an essentially symbolic, analogical, orassociational rather than a strictly causal axis of explanation.5 Actors in whathas been called an ongoing “drama of being,” and participants, as they cer-tainly intuited themselves to be, in a richly variegated community thatreached out from humankind to encompass the world of nature and itscountless denizens as well as the more enduring realm of the divine, thepeoples of “premodern” societies appear instinctively to have been moved bythe explanatory power of symbol and analogy. “The mainspring of the acts,thoughts, and feelings of early man was the conviction that the divine wasimmanent in nature and nature intimately connected with society.”6 Thementality involved was thoroughly monistic and the degree of consubstan-tiality of those who composed the extended community of being was suchthat it tended to marginalize any distinction or separateness of substanceamong them. As a result, the sharp distinctions that we are accustomed tomake between nature and supernature, between nature, society, and man,between animate and inanimate, were almost wholly lacking. Archaic manwas encompassed by darkness, mystery, and a natural world that he appre-hended almost instinctively in terms of his own psyche. “In the significantmoments of his life,” it has been said, “[he] was confronted not by an in-animate and impersonal nature – not by an ‘It’ but by a ‘Thou.’”7

Nature was alive; it was to the peoples of the Classical world “full of gods”or “full of Jupiter”; it expressed, both in its benign cyclical rhythms and in itsintimidating and catastrophic upheavals, the movements and indwelling ofthe divine. Hardly surprising, then, that man himself should be conceivedless as an individual standing ultimately alone than as an integrated part ofsociety, deriving therefrom whatever value he possessed. Hardly surprising,either, that society itself should be conceived as imbedded in nature, asentangled intimately with the processes of the natural world. Hardly surpris-ing, again, that its primary function should be something that exceeded thepowers of any individual – namely, the preservation of the cosmic order by acomplex system of ritual and taboo, the prevention of natural catastrophes,the seasonal regeneration of the world via the ritual elaboration of New Yearfestivals, and the “harmonious integration” of humankind with nature. Thatis to say, nature being but a “manifestation of the divine,” it is hardly surpris-ing that the primary function of society (the family, the tribe, and ultimatelywhat we would call “the state”), the first object of its anxious, daily solici-tude, should be what we, again, would call “the religious.”

Gate of the Gods

15

Characteristic of the form of religiosity involved was the symbolization ofour familiar “profane” space and time via the analogy of the all-embracingspatial and temporal order of the cosmos itself to which it was typicallyrelated as microcosm to macrocosm. To that cosmic order, to the repetitivemovements of the heavenly bodies and the cyclic rhythms of vegetativenature, the forms, laws, and procedures of terrestrial political society were,then, intuited as analogous. So far, indeed, as mundane objects in the exter-nal world and human acts alike were concerned, they were understood asderiving whatever value they possessed from their participation in the celes-tial archetypes and forms of “reality” that transcended them.

Thus terrestrial structures like temples, sacred places, royal palaces, cities,were regarded as having been fashioned on the model of celestial or cosmicprototypes. They were often assimilated, ideologically speaking, to thecosmic mountain which was understood to have emerged from the primordialwaters at the creative moment when a god or gods had rescued cosmos fromchaos. They were understood, moreover, to be situated at the very axismundi, the hub, center, or navel (omphalos) of the world, the numinousintersection of heaven and earth. In Maya terms the portal of the Other-world; in Mesopotamian terms the point of contact with the gods. Thename Babylon (Ba-b-ila-ni) itself means “gate of the gods,” and the zigguratsof Mesopotamia as well as the pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica symbol-ize the primal cosmic mountain and represent the numinous axis mundi.

If this was the case with terrestrial structures something similar was trueof human acts. “Just as profane space is abolished by the symbolism of theCenter, which projects any temple, palace, or building into the same centralpoint of mythical space,” Mircea Eliade has said, “so [too] any meaningfulact performed by archaic man, any real act, i.e. any repetition of any arche-typal gesture, suspends duration, abolishes profane time, and participates inmythical time.”8 This was exemplified quintessentially by the New Yearfestivals of the ancient Near East which were devoted to the symbolic “regen-eration” of time, and which characteristically involved a dramatic ritual inwhich the king, as earthly representative or son of the creative god, wasunderstood not merely to memorialize the primordial creative act, the estab-lishment of cosmos and the defeat of the forces of chaos, but also in someprofound sense to “reactualize” that great cosmogonic moment. For it wasthe king who, as himself a divinity (thus Egypt, Japan, Mesoamerica) or asson or earthly representative of the divinity (thus Mesopotamia, China, andelsewhere), was burdened with the heavy responsibility for ensuring by aceaseless round of ritual and sacrifice the good order, not merely of humansociety, but of the cosmos at large in which human society was so deeplyembedded.

Gate of the Gods

16

At the heart of primitive and archaic “politics,” then, lay one form oranother of the cosmic “religion” – so much so, indeed, that for the greaterpart of human history it is an egregious anachronism even to make use ofthose words, the very definitions of which presuppose our modern Westerndistinction between the religious and the political and evoke misleading inti-mations of the modern church–state dialectic. This becomes unmistakablyevident if one takes the trouble to examine archaic concepts of kingship,which were conceived in China and Mesoamerica no less than in the ancientNear East and elsewhere as an institution “anchored in the cosmos.” “If werefer to kingship as a political institution,” Henri Frankfort has said,

we assume a point of view which would have been incomprehensible tothe ancients. We imply that the human polity can be considered in itself.The ancients, however [and as we have seen], experienced human life aspart of a widely spreading network of connections which reached beyondthe local and national communities into the hidden depths of nature andthe powers that rule nature. The purely secular – insofar as it could begranted to exist at all – was the purely trivial. Whatever was significant wasimbedded in the life of the cosmos, and it was precisely the king’s functionto maintain the harmony of that integration.9

Frankfort was speaking here with explicit reference to the ancient Near East,but evidence for the existence of sacral kingship and versions of the cosmicreligiosity that sustained it is broadcast across the globe in regions as fardistant one from another as Ireland and the Sudan, India and Peru, Scandi-navia and Polynesia, West Africa and China. The Chinese empire, indeed, thesuccessive geologic deposits of Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist patterns ofthought notwithstanding, proved in the long haul to be the most stable andenduring manifestation of what has been called the “ontocratic state” or stateas “the embodiment of the cosmic totality,” with the emperor “identifiedwith the cosmic center, which was also the place of the ancestors.”10 Thus,for two millennia and more, and independently of analogous developmentselsewhere in Eurasia and Mesoamerica, it remained the emperor’s duty, asSon of Heaven and possessor of the mysterious “mandate of Heaven,” tobridge the gulf between heaven and earth and, by scrupulously performing acyclic round of rituals and sacrifices, to secure the maintenance of order,cosmic no less than natural, natural no less than societal. As late as October 6,1899, the Peking Gazette carried a decree in which the emperor confessed hisown sinfulness as the likely cause of drought in the land.11 The structure ofthe altars of earth and heaven to the north and south of the imperial palaceat Beijing, at which the emperor offered sacrifice at the summer and winter

Gate of the Gods

17

solstices respectively, was “meant to indicate the cosmic totality at the centerof which the emperor dwells as the all-commanding axis [mundi] on whichboth the order of the universe and that of society and the state depend.”12

Comparable arrangements prevailed at the Vietnamese imperial capital ofHué, and the ceaseless round of imperial sacrifices at both Beijing and Huéwere destined to continue on into the twentieth century (until 1912 and1915 respectively).

What was presupposed by all of this, and despite the successive religiousand ideological accretions of centuries, was clearly a variant of what we havecalled the cosmic religiosity. And such, indeed, was the quasi-universalityof one or other version of that cosmic religiosity, and of the royal culticpractices grounded in it, that commentators of Jungian sympathies haveunderstandably been tempted to see them as reflecting Jungian “archetypesof the collective unconscious,” patterns hard-wired, as it were, into the verystructure of the human psyche itself. From that point of view “the cosmologyof myth” can be understood as nothing other than “the exteriorized self-portrayal of the inner psychic world,” and “the complex ritual of renewal inthe seasonal festivals of archaic times” viewed as “composed of the same ele-ments as the reconstitutive process in the psyche, the one faithfully mirroringthe other.”13 But however marked the universality of such phenomena, itmust be insisted that it is not without its limits. And those limits preclude theacceptance of views so all-embracing in their reach. The origins of the institu-tion of cosmic kingship and religiosity may well be lost to us in the deepshadows of prehistory, but their decline and demise in the modern era arenot. They have taken place, instead, in the unforgiving glare of contemporaryscrutiny. They form a recognizable part of the historical record and that factis not to be ignored.

Rather than being wired, then, into the unchanging uniformities of nature,cosmic kingship and its attendant religiosity are lodged instead amid theshifting contingencies of history. But if their formidable lifespan, howeverremarkable, has proved in the end to have met its term, it has proved also tohave been distinguished over the years and across the distant reaches of theglobe by an impressive measure of creative variety. In what has gone before,we have been able to select for scrutiny only a few central threads of whatdeveloped over millennia into an intricate and richly variegated tapestry. It istime now to take a look at a few of the sub-patterns which came, over thevastnesses of time and space, to be woven around those central threads. Wewill do so by focusing briefly and in turn on several cases of sacral kingshipdrawn from widely scattered locations around the globe and spanning (col-lectively) no less than five millennia of the human odyssey. The exercise willbe the more valuable in that it will serve also to highlight disparities in the

Gate of the Gods

18

types and amounts of evidence available to us as we seek to come to termswith the cases in question.

East Asia: Imperial Japan (Seventh to Twenty-first Centuries)

Although they are compilations which draw on earlier documents now lostto us, as well as on much more ancient oral traditions, the oldest Japanesewritings extant are the earliest chronicles – the Kojiki or “Record of AncientMatters” (711–12 CE) and the Nihongi or “Chronicles of Japan” (c.720).Along with the later Kogoshu-i (806–7), and via a combination of myth,legend, and history, they together trace the origins of the Japanese empire allthe way back to the primordial decision of the kami or great ancestral deitiesto send down to earth from heaven the grandson of the sun-goddess,Amaterasu-o--mikami, charging him with the conquest of the realm andpromising him that the imperial succession would continue “unbroken andprosperous, coeternal with heaven and earth.”14 The legendary first emperor,Jimmu (660 BCE), his equally mythical prehistoric successors, and thosewho, from the sixth and seventh centuries CE, we can begin at last to discernin the intermittent light of recorded history stretching forward right down tothe present, all came to be viewed as members of an imperial family with anunbroken and divine lineage stretching back to that originating moment ofcosmic condescension.

The primordial divine promise and the endlessly repeated claims that theJapanese imperial office had remained in the same imperial family downthrough the ages to the present have naturally tempted observers to attributea comparable degree of continuity to the lineaments of the imperial institu-tion itself. Politicians, certainly, have not infrequently succumbed to thattemptation. Thus Nakasone Yasuhiro, for example, sometime Prime Ministerof Japan, did not hesitate to assure the Budgetary Commission of the Diet’sLower House in March, 1986, “that Japan has had the same tradition andculture for two thousand years and that the lives of the Japanese people havecentered on the emperor throughout that history.”15 Similarly, the greatimperial pageants of the era of Meiji restoration (1868 onwards) – thenational holidays celebrating the emperor’s birthday or the legendary acces-sion of the Emperor Jimmu in 660 BCE, the Empire Festival celebrating theinception of rule over the nation by the sun-goddess’s imperial descendants,the triumphal military reviews, the imperial funerals and weddings, the greatimperial progressions throughout the nation’s provinces (a practice renewedby the Sho-wa Emperor Hirohito in February, 1946, less than two monthsafter being forced publicly to disavow his divine status) – all such imperialceremonial performances served as devices strengthening the cult of the

Gate of the Gods

19

emperor as the still point of the turning Japanese world, the very pivot or axisof the national unity and identity. Of course, all was not quite as it seemed.No less than the seemingly timeless pomp and ceremony surrounding theBritish monarchy (a good deal of it the work of imaginative and resourcefulcourt liturgists during the last quarter of the nineteenth century), much ofthe “traditional” ceremonial round associated with the modern Japaneseemperors represents, in fact, a quite self-conscious “invention of tradition”responding to contemporary European court practice and dating back nofurther into the past than the era of Meiji restoration itself.16

Much, it may be, but by no means all. Revisionism undoubtedly has itsplace, but on this matter, as on others, it can easily be taken too far. The con-troversy that broke out in Japan in 1990 concerning some elements of theaccession rituals planned by the imperial court for the new Heisei emperor(the former Crown Prince Akihito) may serve as a salutary reminder that theMeiji inventors of tradition (in common with their counterparts in Britain)could hardly have been so successful in their endeavors had they not inher-ited an ancient core tradition on which they could readily build.

The English coronation liturgy used in 1953 to solemnize the accession ofQueen Elizabeth II had, in fact, a millennial history stretching all the way backto the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon “Edgar ordo.” An even greater antiquityhas to be recognized in the elaborate imperial enthronement or accessionceremonies of Japan. At the accession of the Sho-wa emperor those ceremonieswere spread across the better part of two years (December 25, 1926 toNovember 30, 1928). They began with the senso, or formal transfer of the(divinely donated) imperial regalia and announcement of the successionbefore the sanctuary of the imperial ancestors and the shrines of the SacredRegalian Mirror and of the gods of heaven and earth. And they proceeded viatwo other major moments. First, the sokui-rei, or ceremony of ascending thethrone and announcing the succession to the gods of heaven and earth, to thespirits of the imperial ancestors, and to the nation and world at large. Second,the daijo--sai, or “Great New Food Festival,” which was then followed byculminating ceremonies of sacred dances before the shrine of the SacredRegalian Mirror and of worship by the emperor and empress at the shrine ofthe gods of Heaven and Earth and at the sanctuary of the spirits of the imper-ial ancestors.17

Although this whole round of accession ceremonies was suffused with thespirit of the ancient nature- and ancestor-oriented folk religion still embeddedin state Shinto, public controversy in 1990 came to focus specifically on thedaijo--sai. To that ceremonial moment representatives of the Christian denom-inations and of the socialist and communist parties all objected on the groundsthat it involved an unconstitutional extension of state support to religion and,

Gate of the Gods

20

Gate of the Gods

21

Figure 1 Japan. Emperor Hirohito during his enthronement in 1928. (Keystone,Hamburg)

as the Christians chose to put it, the transformation of “a ceremony of onespecific religious sect [Shinto] into a state function.”18 Brushing off all suchcriticisms and claiming (without, one suspects, much conviction) that the cer-emony in question was primarily a secular one, the government committedsome 20 million dollars to fund the event, and it was attended (though at arequisitely discreet remove) by the Prime Minister himself, the members of hiscabinet, and a goodly number of other Japanese public figures as well.

The outcome of the whole imbroglio was the focusing of a good deal ofpublic attention and curiosity (some of it mildly, if anachronistically, prurient)on one of the most ancient and mysterious of Japanese imperial rites. If theceremony of ascending the throne involves worship of the sun-goddess,Amaterasu-o--mikami, and recalls the mythological dispatch to earth of hergrandson, the first emperor, along with the imperial regalia, the daijo--sai,Holtom says, “and its [purifying] preparatory rites are deeply stamped with aninterest in safeguarding the growth and fertility of crops.” On that occasion, itwas traditionally understood, the emperor, screened from the intrusion of anyprofane gaze, and acting “as the great representative of the people before thekami, by the act of presenting food [the specially planted and harvested firstfruits], and by the partaking thereof himself,” entered “into an intimacy ofcommunion with spiritual powers.” He was viewed as becoming, in effect, thevery “repository of the sacred Rice Spirit,” and, as such, “the sacred livingkami in whose magical person is enfolded the entire welfare of his people.”19

Do such archaisms, however engaging, warrant the degree of attentiongiven to them here? Clearly I believe they do, and not simply because of theirintrinsic interest. For they throw some light on a phenomenon that cannotsimply be taken for granted, namely, the odd survival across the centuries andas a supposed fount of political legitimacy of an imperial office that, moreoften than not, and long before the advent of the Kamikura shogunate of thetwelfth century, was in fact bereft of any real political power. Already in theNara era (710–94), not all that long after the holders of the imperial officefirst emerge from the shadows of legend and myth into the light of recordedhistory, dictatorial leaders or regents drawn from the Soga and Fujiwara fam-ilies had begun to arrogate to themselves the real governing power. By sodoing they had established a governmental pattern that, with periodic fluctu-ations, was to dominate Japanese history down to the nineteenth century.Absent its crucial religious role, to which the accession rites continue power-fully to attest, the office of emperor could well have been destined todisappear altogether. But it did not do so, and its legitimating function waseventually to find regular and formalized symbolic expression in the acces-sion ceremonies at which each successive Tokugawa shogun assumed hisexecutive role. This tradition whereby the emperor (theoretically) delegated

Gate of the Gods

22

executive authority to the shogun alone made credible the way in which theMeiji restoration of 1868 was represented by the oligarchs who had engi-neered it, namely, as the moment when the emperor took back into his ownhands the power he and his predecessors had previously condescended toconfer on the shogunate. It served also to afford at least a thin veneer ofcredibility to the subsequent representation of the Meiji constitution of 1889(as also, more surprisingly, that of 1947) as one “granted” by the emperor tothe nation (“a gift of the emperor and his one line of ancestors”), therebysuggesting or affirming that he himself transcended it. An unmistakableecho, surely, of the traditionally mystical, reverential, and grandiose under-standing of the nature of the imperial office.20

Equatorial Africa: The Kingdom of Kuba (Seventeenth toTwentieth Centuries CE)

Now incorporated into modern-day Zaire, the kingdom of Kuba (a namegiven to it by its neighbors to the south) occupied in its late nineteenth-century heyday an area roughly the size of Belgium. Its territory was boundedapproximately by the Sankaru, Kasi, and Lunna rivers. With an overall popu-lation falling somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 persons, it wasethnically diverse, including among others, and along with the dominantKuba people, the aboriginal Keta and the pygmoid Cwa. Although a carefulanalysis of the oral traditions reveals that the Kuba had had a growing pres-ence in the region stretching back already for hundreds of years, before theearly seventeenth century they appear to have been organized simply as acongeries of chiefdoms. At that time, however, the outlines of a coherentkingdom begin to emerge. Indeed, the distinguished Africanist Jan Vansinahas been able to trace the succession of kings belonging to the Matoondynasty from Shyaam a Mbul a Ngong (c.1620, and much celebrated in thetraditions) all the way down to his twentieth-century successors.

Since 1900 when the capital city fell to European invaders and thekingdom itself was absorbed into a colony, it has been devoid of any indepen-dent, sovereign status. Such was the unforgiving fate of many anotherAfrican kingdom, of course, but some of them – the Shilluk, for example, ofthe Nilotic Sudan, or the Ashanti of Ghana, or the kingdom of Benin in WestAfrica – had already attracted the attention of Europeans and Europeanscholars. As a result, they possess to this day a degree of name-recognitionthat Kuba still lacks. But the latter’s achievement, it had been said, is “inmany ways . . . comparable” with that racked up by “the kingdom of Beninfrom about 1500 onward,” and it has, in effect, “been underrated in thehistory of Africa.”21 It was unique in having ridden out the great upheavals

Gate of the Gods

23

Gate of the Gods

24

Figure 2 Africa, Kingdom of Kuba. Ndopportrait of King Mishe miShyaangmaMbul. Eighteenth-century BushoongKuba, Democratic Republic of Congo,wood (crossopterix febrifuga), 191/2 × 75/8

× 85/8 in. (Brooklyn Museum. 61.33.Purchased with funds given by Mr and MrsAlastair B. Martin, Mrs DonaldM. Oenslager, Mr and Mrs RobertE. Blum, and the Mrs Florence A. BlumFund)

Ndop wooden carving of King ShyaamaMbul aNgoong, Kuba-Bushoong,probably late eighteenth century, from theDemocratic Republic of Congo (formerlyZaire). (© Copyright The Trustees of TheBritish Museum)

that had brought down other Central African states, leaving it, by the latenineteenth century, as the sole surviving kingdom in the region, and onepossessed of a distinguished artistic tradition capped by a celebrated series ofdynastic statues or revered royal “doubles.” As a kingdom, it stands out alsofor its organizational and institutional complexity, as well as for the compara-tive clarity of what historians have been able to learn about its developmentfrom the oral traditions, from linguistic and ethnographic data, and from thewritten record which (apart from one or two earlier documents) becomesavailable only for the period from 1880 onwards. Whatever the case, byfocusing on Kuba, it is possible to come away with a reasonably good senseof the nature of kingship in a “premodern” Central African setting – though(the evidence about it being quite fragmentary) with a less coherent sense ofthe pattern of religious thinking that that kingship presupposed.

The king, in whose person all governmental hierarchies culminated, washead of the centrally situated Bushoon chiefdom, the largest and most power-ful of the country’s several chiefdoms. Flanked on the east and west by muchsmaller and subordinate chieftaincies, it formed by 1880 the very core of thekingdom and accounted for somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percentof land and population alike. No less than 10 percent of that overall popula-tion lived in the capital city which was itself capable of fielding enoughmilitary power to dominate the entire kingdom. Within the core region, andon a day-to-day basis, a constabulary composed of about 40 royal slaves andcommanded by one of the king’s sons sufficed to ensure that the govern-ment’s edicts were respected. For emergency situations, whether within thekingdom at large or along (or beyond) its borders, the royal governmentcould activate a formally organized and officered military force in excess of2,000 men. That was enough, the record suggests, to maintain the real,effective unity of the kingdom and to ensure that it could properly claim tobeing something more coherent, governmentally speaking, than a merelyloose-limbed confederation of chiefdoms.

That coherence is reflected in the kingdom’s sophisticated apparatus ofconciliar, administrative, judicial, and economic institutions and practices.This it was that made possible the achievement of a fine balance between twopotentially competing phenomena – on the one hand, a high degree of par-ticipation by the various power groups in the several councils of the city andof the realm, and on the other, the ability of the king, acting via a “bureau-cracy of title holders” (the kolm) and a judicial system of city tribunals andvillage moot-courts, to ensure that the rule of law prevailed, that his ownedicts were enforced, that taxes were paid, that the required labor on publicworks was performed, and that the growing agricultural surpluses needed tosupport this whole governmental apparatus and to enlarge the royal treasury

Gate of the Gods

25

were indeed achieved. The introduction in the seventeenth century ofhigher-yielding American crops (maize, cassava, beans, chili peppers, etc.)and their rise to dominance by the nineteenth, the maintenance of tradingconnections with the Portuguese–African commercial network, the existenceof a well-organized, well-protected, and well-policed system of internalmarkets, and the steady and effective application of pressure from the gov-ernmental center22 – all such developments helped to generate those vitaleconomic surpluses and to secure, thereby, the power of the king.

But if the kings of Kuba were possessed of a very considerable measure ofpower and were not afraid, if need be, to use it, the degree of support theyappear to have received from their subjects was so strong and so enthusiasticas to suggest that it stemmed less from fear of punishment or hope forreward than from some deeply ingrained conviction concerning the funda-mental legitimacy of the royal authority. And, as in so many other Africankingdoms, the roots of that legitimacy were unquestionably engaged in whatwe would classify as “religious” soil.

We are not at all well informed about the nature and history of the Kubareligion, and the fragmentary quality of the evidence surviving precludes anytruly confident grasp of its development across time. By the nineteenthcentury an earlier cult of the ancestors appears to have become marginal, oreven to have disappeared, and been replaced by a belief in metempsychosis.Similarly, although the worship of the ngesh (nature-spirits), believed to dwellin forests, rivers, and springs and to have a degree of control over fertility,was still alive and well into the 1950s, those spirits appear, across time, tohave increasingly been seen as subordinated to the power of the supremecreator-deity, Ncyeem, to whom ritual sites located in every village were ded-icated. For our purposes, it must suffice to note that both the ngesh and thecreator-god figured centrally in the ideology of kingship. And about that, atleast in its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century form, we are somewhatbetter informed than we are about Kuba religion at large.

The king of Kuba was the lineal descendant of the great Shyáám, the earlyseventeenth-century king who was portrayed in the traditions as the greatculture-shaper of Kuba and as a great shaman-like figure possessed of someof the attributes of a priest of the nature spirits. He was also the allegedlylineal descendant of the man whom the nature spirits had chosen to be “chiefof chiefs.” To those potent forms of legitimation had come to be added, inthe post-seventeenth-century “age of kings”, the belief that the king was tobe identified with Kap aNgaam, the nature spirit (and Bushong ethnic spirit)who dwelt in the sun, and, further, that he had received his power from thecreator-god himself.

Thus the poem:

Gate of the Gods

26

My eagle is the eagle of the ngesh of the forest,My kingship stems from Nyony a Mboom,It is Ncyeem who has given this kingship

into my hands.23

The solemn rituals involved in a royal installation reflected the significance ofsuch credentials. They were spread across an entire year and involved, amongother things, the king’s meeting in the forest at night with muyum, thekeeper of what may be described as the royal regalian charms (including theskullcap of one of the royal predecessors) which were regarded as yet anothersource of royal power.

The Kuba king, then, was unquestionably a sacred figure. Despite the dis-appearance of an ancestor cult among the Kuba at large, there had persisted(or emerged) a cult of the nature spirits of the deceased royal ancestors, andthat cult may have involved the display of the celebrated dynastic statues (ordoubles). The king was encumbered by ritual prohibitions (he could not eatin the presence of his wives, could not cut across a field, could not seathimself on the bare ground, and so on). These taboos were viewed as neces-sary to protect the powers he possessed over rain, the fertility of the land, andthe fertility of women. Such powers were viewed as similar to those of themoon, which, as elsewhere in Africa, was itself linked with the fertility of theland. At the new moon every month, the king was called upon to perform inthe seclusion of the royal compound a ritual sacrifice for the wellbeing ofthe kingdom. The order of things, which it was his duty to guarantee, wasviewed as extending well beyond the political, legal, social, and economic,reaching into the depths of nature and touching the cosmos itself. It comesas no surprise, then, that a “patterned anarchy” should ensue upon theannouncement of a royal death, for without a king, it was believed, societyitself would wither away. In the late nineteenth century, at least, the king wasclearly something more exalted than “the lieutenant of God,” which was allthat Mbop Mábíínc maMbéky (the royal incumbent in 1953) was willing toclaim to be. Instead, he was Ncyeem akwoonc, “god on earth,” a being insome profound sense responsible, it may be, for life itself. As one man put it:“If I sleep it is the king; if I eat it is the king; if I drink it is the king.”24

Mesoamerica: The Maya Kingship of theClassic Period (250–900 CE)

Of the great Mesomerican civilizations that trace their roots back to theancient Olmec “mother culture,” the Maya has emerged in recent years as insome ways the most striking. Not least of all because “as much as 85 percent

Gate of the Gods

27

of the total body of Classic Maya inscriptions can now be ‘read’,” and “theancient Maya . . . [have become] . . . the only truly historical civilization ofthe New World, with records going back to the third century after Christ.”25

Their civilization flourished, somewhat improbably, in the swampy lowlandof what is now Belize, in Guatemala, and part of southern Mexico, as well asin the drier and thin-soiled lowland of the Yucatan peninsula, and in theuplands and Pacific coastal region embracing stretches of modern Guatemala,Honduras, El Salvador, and Chiapas, Mexico. After a long formative periodstretching back to the beginnings of forms of settled village life in the earlysecond millennium BCE, the Maya civilization entered on what is usuallydescribed as its Classic Period (250–900 CE), and endured until the tradi-tional order slid into decline and eventual dissolution under conditionsmarked by mounting population pressure, environmental degradation, in-cessant warfare, and what is sometimes described as a transition to more“secular” cultural forms.

That traditional order, which crystallized in the late pre-Classic and earlyClassic era, was anything but secular in character. It centered on a multitudeof small city-states with constantly shifting rivalries and alignments and ruledby kings. At the height of the Classic Period there were more than 50 of theseindependent states, embracing altogether an area in excess of 100,000 squaremiles and ruling over a population of farmers, merchants, skilled urban crafts-men, warriors, and aristocrats running into the millions. These Maya king-doms pivoted on capital cities organized around cultic or ceremonial sitesoften of considerable grandeur and maintained or serviced by urban popula-tions running into tens of thousands (in the case of Tikal, at its peak thelargest of the kingdoms, probably somewhere in excess of 60,000). Promi-nent among the kingdoms in the late pre-Classic and Classic eras were Tikal,Uaxactún, El Miradur and Palanque in the southern lowlands, Copán to theeast, and Cerros to the north.

Once viewed, at least in comparison with the Aztecs, as a peace-loving,somewhat Utopian, society ruled by priests, the Maya have emerged inrecent years, as their complex writing and the programs of hieroglyphs ontheir monuments have progressively been decyphered, as a somewhat moretypical people. They were socially hierarchical and extremely warlike; humansacrifice and ritual (auto) bloodletting played a very important role in theircultic life, and they appear in the Classic Period not to have had a distinctpriestly “order.” That mediatorial role was played, instead, by the kingsthemselves. Possessed of extensive powers, the kings were charged with abroad array of military, administrative, judicial, economic, and, above all,ritual and religious functions. These last occupied a central place in the life ofthe Maya, and the kings’ ability to discharge such crucial functions was the

Gate of the Gods

28

key factor serving to legitimate their rule. In their drive to erect the greatacropolises that dominated their capital cities, they must have made on aris-tocrats and commoners alike truly enormous demands. And yet they seemnot to have felt the need to maintain either police forces or standing armies.Instead, they clearly felt themselves able to rely on the willingness of theirsubjects to commit themselves to such vast and burdensome enterprises.Hence the obvious question: whence came that willingness?

The answer almost certainly lies in the nature of the Maya kingship, in thesacral status the Maya characteristically accorded to their king as “great sunlord” (Mah K’ina), “Holy Lord” (ch’ul ahau), or “Lord of Lords” (“anahau of the ahauob”). “The rituals of the ahauob [nobility],” Schele andFreidel have said,

declared that the magical person of the king was the pivot and pinnacle ofa pyramid of people, the summit of a ranking of families that extended outto incorporate everyone in the kingdom – from highest to lowest. Hisperson was the conduit of the sacred, the path of communication to theOtherworld, the means of contacting the dead, indeed of surviving deathitself. He was the clarifier of the mysteries of everyday life, of planting andharvesting, of illness and health. . . . The people reaped the benefits of theking’s intercession with the supernatural world and shared in the materialwealth his successful performance brought to the community.26

If that performance was certainly played out on the battlefield or in the nego-tiation for his subjects of favorable trade agreements, it was enactedquintessentially in the rites and sacrifices that punctuated the year (with a NewYear’s festival being probably the central moment) and called for the erectionof the great complexes of platforms, pyramids, plazas, and temples uponwhich so much royal attention was lavished. For “like the trees of the fourdirections, which raise up the sky over the earth, the king was the central pillar– the Tree of Life who raised the sky that arched over his entire realm.”27

This last statement is a revealing one. It is pertinent both to the natureand function of the pyramids and temples and to the ceaseless round of ritesand sacrifices the kings themselves performed in those settings. These cere-monial centers were constructed as microcosmic images of the macrocosm,“stylized representations of the four-quartered universe,” oriented to “astro-nomical events such as the solstices, equinoxes, and Venus cycles,” alignedwith points on the horizon where the sun and Venus (the latter recognized asboth the morning and evening star) would predictably make their appear-ance.28 Looking back to the primordial sacred landscape as it had appeared atthe creation, the pyramids or platforms on which they built their temples

Gate of the Gods

29

Gate of the Gods

30

Figure 3 Maya. Tikal, Temple One; Archaeoastronomy teaches us that this planetaryalignment of Jupiter, Venus, and Mars above Temple One at Tikal will not occur again forsome 300 years. The Classic period city in the jungle of the Guatemalan Peten region wasone of the most powerful imperial cities of the Maya. Today, Tikal is a destination atopthe list of travelers who wish to study the ancient culture of the Maya. (Kenneth Garrett)

represented the sacred mountain. Each centered on an axis mundi (or hub ofthe world), the World Tree, which the divine father had used at creation tolift the sky up above the earth, and which constituted the numinous point ofcontact with the divine, the conduit between the celestial overworld, theearthly middle world, and Xibalba, the dark underworld of the dead.

With that World Tree, as monumental representations make clear, the kingwas himself symbolically identified. He was, in effect, “the axis and pivotmade flesh.”29 If the physical layout and orientation of the temple mountevoked in microcosm the lineaments of the macrocosm, so, too, embedded asthey were in the cyclicity of time, did the ritual performances of the king reit-erate the archetypical divine gestures of the mythopoeic past – such as thelifting of the sky above the earth, or, again, the “harrowing of hell” by theHero Twins, their defeat by trickery of the Dark Lords of Death, and theirsubsequent ascension into the sky where one of them, like all subsequentMaya kings, became identified with the life-giving jaguar sun-god, the otherwith Venus. Thus, at the dedication of the temple, it fell to the king to presideover the erection of the World Tree, a ceremony by which the cosmogonicmoment was reactualized. And by the ritual acts he performed on the templemount, some of them witnessed by his subjects assembled in the great plazasurrounding it, whether those acts involved the letting of his own blood, orthe offering of human or animal sacrifices, or both, he opened up the portalof the Otherworld and, as the great mediator for his people, drew into ecsta-tic communion with him the ancestors, gods, divine forces, upon whosebenevolent engagement success in war, the fertility of the land, the wellbeingof the kingdom, and the very order of the cosmos itself all depended.

About the Maya pantheon itself, various uncertainties remain. And it iscertainly the case that the “cosmovision” we have been discussing is anexceedingly complex and sometimes quite baffling affair.30 In order, then, toconvey a reasonably accurate “feel” for what was involved, it may be preferableto refrain from further generalization about the Maya religious vision at large,and to conclude instead by focusing briefly, and by way of illustration, on thecultic performance of the king in just two of the multiple kingdoms aboutwhich historians and anthropologists have, over the past several decades,become increasingly well informed. The first is Cerros, a kingdom which cameinto existence in the late pre-Classic period; the second, Palenque, a kingdomof outstanding importance during the Classic period, one which enjoyed itsgolden age in the seventh century CE, and one for which the archaeologicalrecord established in the past half-century is particularly rich and revealing.

So far as Cerros is concerned, let me simply draw attention to the fact thatthe construction, astronomical alignment, and emblematic program of thefirst temple (c.50 BCE) was such as to align with the celestial path of the sun

Gate of the Gods

31

and of Venus the (clockwise) ceremonial progression of the king from an innersanctum in the east to the entrance to the temple at the front of the pyramidon which it was built. Into the façade on the “front” or plaza side, were setfour great masks. Two of them represented the jaguar sun-god as he rose andas he set; the other two represented Venus in the guise, respectively, of themorning and the evening star. The decoration of the temple, then, was “amodel of the sun’s daily path,” and something more than that. It was also “adepiction of the Ancestral Twins,” one of whom, it will be recalled, was sym-bolized by the sun, the other by Venus. And the whole was so designed andpresented that it could be read in that way by the king’s subjects assembled inthe plaza below. In effect, when, having completed his ritual bloodletting ontheir behalf and showing himself now to the people,

the king stood upon the stairway between the four great masks [on thefront face of the pyramid], he represented the cosmic cycle of the day, buthe was simultaneously at the center of a four-part pattern representing thelineage cycle of the Hero Twins as his [divine] founding ancestors.31

The ancestral Hero Twins also figured large in the Temple of Inscriptionswhich Pacal, the great, long-reigning king of Palenque, constructed in thelast decade of his life, and which remains one of the most celebrated of themany extraordinary monuments surviving in the Mesoamerican region. Howcould it not be such, when the king-lists which decorate the pyramid-temple-tomb were extended by Pacal’s son, Chan-Bahlum, to encompass not onlythe mythical founder of the dynasty but also “the divinities who establishedthe order of the cosmos at the beginning of this current manifestation of the[cyclical] universe”?32 Many of those royal ancestors are depicted on therichly decorated lid of the great sarcophagus which Pacal had himself pro-vided for. And the central image on that lid represented Pacal’s fall at death

down the great trunk of the World Tree into the open jaws of the Other-world. At the same time . . . a sense of resurrection [is incorporated] intothis death image. As Pacal falls, he is accompanied by a bowl of sacrificemarked with the glyph of the sun. . . . Like the sun, the king would riseagain in the east after his journey through Xibalba. He was, after all, theliving manifestation of the Hero Twins who had set the example of how todefeat the Lords of Death.33

Those of us endowed by nature with a robustly commonsensical temperament(though commonsensical, we should not forget, in a specifically modern,Western fashion) may well be tempted to dismiss such classic Maya cultural

Gate of the Gods

32

moments as mere pieces of esoterica, in themselves, no doubt, intriguingenough, but with no more than marginal pertinence to the gritty realities ofpolitical life. We would be unwise, however, to yield to any such temptation.The extraordinary investment of time, effort, economic resources, artistic cre-ativity, and religious energy made throughout the Maya world in order toframe and set the stage for such royal performances and events attests power-fully to their importance and to the cultural and political significance attachingto them. It attests also to the fundamentally sacral nature of the Maya kingshipand to the centrality of the mediatorial role Maya kings were called upon toplay in their cyclically repeated ritual efforts to align the microcosm of humansociety with the divinely constructed macrocosmic order, and to integratehumankind into a “natural” order that was itself impregnated with the divine.

Western and Northern Europe: Celtic and Germanic Kingshipprior to the Advent of Christianity (from the Fourth to the

Eleventh Centuries CE)

It was during the period stretching from the fourth to the eleventh centuriesthat Christianity became the dominant religion in western and northernEurope. It took hold first in the lands that were (or had been) provinces ofthe Roman Empire, spread thence into Ireland, Scotland, and (later) north-ern Europe, with the culminating evangelization of Norway and Swedengathering momentum in the tenth century and reaching its term by about1100. Historians attempting to assess the nature of Celtic and Germanickingship in the pagan era prior to those centuries of evangelization haveoften found themselves, given the nature, provenance, and paucity of the evi-dence surviving, confronting interpretative challenges of an unusually testingkind. Generalization has proved frequently to be difficult, agreement oftenelusive. But if a nervous caution nips persistently at the heels of those seekingto address the continental center, a higher degree of confidence is availableto those whose interest is focused on the insular or the northern periphery. Itis with the periphery, then, that we would be wise to begin.

The sacral character of the kings of pre-Christian Ireland is not in dispute.In common with their Celtic counterparts elsewhere, the pagan Irish did notthemselves commit their lore to writing. One has to quarry the pertinentinformation instead from the ancient Irish law tracts, and from the historicaltraditions and epic tales recorded for posterity by later Christian redactors.But whatever the degree of Christian “overpainting”, those writings are farfrom having been completely depaganized, and the outlines of the picturethat emerges when the overlay is removed, while less complete than onemight like, is comparatively clear and consistent.

Gate of the Gods

33

“The Irish law tracts,” Binchy tells us “still show a rural society consistingof a congeries of petty kingdoms, each governed by a rí (king),”34 who wasselected from among “the royal kindred,” those possessed of the inheritedroyal blood. The priestly and judicial functions of kingship passed, with time,into the hands of castes of learned specialists. But it seems likely that in thesmall Irish tuath (or primary territorial unit) the king originally functionednot only as its leader in war, to whom his subjects owed military service andtribute, but also as its lawgiver and judge; and not only as its representative indealings with other kingdoms but also as its representative before the gods,its sacral mediator with the divine forces upon which the wellbeing of hispeople depended.

The importance attaching to the solemn royal rites of inauguration speakspowerfully to the centrality among the king’s responsibilities of that religiousfunction. Those inaugural rites took place at multiple sites scattered acrossIreland and traditionally viewed as sacred. In a manner familiar to us fromother cultures, each of them was identified as the center of the world, markedby the bile or great tree which stood in microcosm for the axis mundi or hubof the universe itself. Of these sites the most celebrated was that at Tara,located in Midhe (i.e. “middle”), the central province of Ireland, at the con-fluence of the other four provinces, and functioning as the center of “acosmographic schema which has parallels in India and other traditions.”Indeed, “the traditional accounts of the disposition of the court of Tara,”reveal it to have been “conceived as a [microcosmic] replica of this cosmo-graphic schema.”35 And at that center or numinous point of contact with thedivine, was periodically held the great “feast of Tara” (Feis Temhra) at whichwas celebrated the inauguration of a new king and his ritual or symbolicmating with the (earth) goddess Medb. Appropriately enough, the inaugura-tion is referred to as banais ríghi, “the wedding-feast of kingship.”

Comparable rites of inauguration and related fertility rites took place inthe other Irish kingdoms (as also, at the other end of the Indo-Europeanworld, in India). They affirmed the sacral character of the king, encouraged,doubtless, the well-attested constriction of his freedom of movement bytaboos of one sort or another, and strengthened the degree to which he washeld responsible for the fertility of the land, the favorable nature of theweather, and the abundance of crops.36 And while it would be impropersimply to suppose that Irish patterns of thought and behavior were identicalwith those of the Brythonic Celts of Wales or the Celts of continentalEurope, the shards of evidence we do possess for the lives of those relatedpeoples in the pre-Christian era strongly suggest that their kings, too, weresacral figures.37

Something similar may be said about the kings of the Scandinavian north.

Gate of the Gods

34

Though late in date, and subject to Christian influences, the evidence con-cerning them is comparatively plentiful. As a result, there is enough scholarlyconsensus for one scholar to insist “That kingship in Old Scandinavia isentirely sacral is nowadays considered as a mere matter of fact.”38 That may bea little over-confident, but in a traditional society possessed of its own versionof the cosmic religiosity, with the cosmic tree Yggdrasill marking the center ofthe divine world, upholding the universe while at the same time reachingdown with its roots to both the world of man and the world of death, it ishardly surprising that the Scandinavian monarchs played a prominent role inthe religious cult. They performed blót or sacrifice not simply “in order toprovide for a good and fertile year . . . but [beyond that] to provide for a yearto come” serving thereby as the “creator of a new year.”39 Regarded as beingof divine descent, they were sometimes revered as gods after their death and,in accord with the pattern familiar to us from so many other parts of theworld, were held responsible for the rotation of the seasons, the fertility of theland, and the general wellbeing of their subjects. Such notions were so deeplyingrained, indeed, and their half-life so very long, that as late as 1527 KingGustav Wasa could complain bitterly at a meeting of the Reichstag of Västeråsthat “the Swedish peasants of Dalarna blamed him if bad weather prevailed –as if he were a god and not a man.”40

Consensus evaporates, however, when one turns to the Germanic king-ship in western and southern Europe during the late imperial age and thesubsequent age of barbarian migration. It being a period of great turbulence,the picture that emerges is understandably more complex and confused. Theevidence from which it has to be reconstructed is much more fragmentary,and the interpretive challenge exacerbated by the fact that the scanty writtenrecord is powerfully shaped by the essentially Roman and/or Christian pre-occupations and perceptions of the various authors involved. Given the factthat the Germanic peoples shared a common Indo-European inheritancewith the Celts and were also, over an extended period of time, close enoughneighbors (or even intermingled) with them for some of their traditions todevelop in tandem, it would seem natural enough to assume the presence ofsacral kingship among them in the pre-Christian era. The more so, indeed, ifone takes into account the testimony of cultural anthropologists and studentsof comparative religion to the ubiquity of that institution. In the past,however, historians of late antique and early medieval Europe have proved tobe somewhat resistant to any such conclusion. They have tended to take theirstand on the paucity of direct evidence available to sustain it, and, while sodoing, to deny the legitimacy of any appeal either to the later Scandinavianevidence or (still less) to cross-cultural analogies.

Here, however, one of the brisk methodological observations that the late

Gate of the Gods

35

anthropologist A.M. Hocart was prone to making is particularly apposite.Commenting admiringly on the way in which the astronomer “coolly recon-structs the history of the solar system for millions of years from observationsof the present only,” he slyly contrasted that celestial endeavor with the wayin which the terrestrial historian insists, in distinctly sublunary fashion, onpinning “his faith to direct evidence, to the writings of eyewitnesses, to coins,to ruins.” Distrusting circumstantial evidence, the historian, he says, persistsinstead in clinging “to his direct evidence as a timid sailor to the coast.”41

The point is well taken and it encourages one to insist, given the ubiquityand longevity of the sacral monarchy, that the burden of proof should prop-erly lie, not (as historians have tended to assume) on the shoulders of thosewho claim its presence among the Germanic peoples of the pre-Christian erasouth of the Baltic, but rather on those who stubbornly persist in denying it,by so doing insisting on the historical “exceptionality” of the Germanic polit-ical experience.

Behind that reluctance, one cannot help feeling, lurk shadowy remnantsof the old Teutonic racial myth, the belief – as Bishop Stubbs had put it in1880, evoking the authority of Caesar’s De bello gallico and Tacitus’s Ger-mania – that the English somehow inherited freedom with their Germanicblood, and that in “the common germs of German institutions” were to befound the origins of the elements of representation and consent destinedultimately for so glorious a future in the providential flowering of Englishconstitutionalism.42 But, then, there is no good reason for assuming thatbecause Germanic kings were so often “elected”, or because limitations ofvarious sorts were placed upon their power, they might not also be regardedas truly sacral kings.43

After all, in what has been dubbed “the first Indo-European contribution”to the development of ideas of kingship, the Hittite pankuš, or assemblyof nobles, which we know to have existed at least in the Old Kingdom(c.2700–2200 BCE), may have had a voice in “the making of the Hittitekings” and certainly “had jurisdiction over the king if the latter committed acrime.” And this despite the fact that the Hittite king was unquestionably afundamentally sacral figure “regarded during his lifetime as the incarnation ofhis deified ancestor” and worshipped after death as a god.44 Nor should weindulge the anachronistic assumption that the thing, or popular assembly,which is described as choosing the Germanic or Scandinavian kings, was nec-essarily itself some sort of “secular” or “democratic” body, lacking a sacralstatus and bereft of sacral functions. Nor, again, should we assume that theact of “election,” even apart from the limitation of choice to members ofroyal families claiming divine descent, was itself devoid of a sacral dimen-sion.45 And as for limitations on the power of pagan Germanic kings in

Gate of the Gods

36

western and southern Europe, the most definite evidence that has comedown to us again suggests very strongly that such limitations, like those suf-fered also by Irish and Scandinavian kings, sprang precisely from their sacralstatus. The king of the Burgundians, as the fourth-century Roman historian,Ammianus Marcellinus, tells us

according to an ancient custom, lays down his power and is deposed, ifunder him the fortune of war has wavered, or the earth has denied suffi-cient crops; just as the Egyptians commonly blame their rulers for suchoccurrences.46

Despite, then, the grumbling persistence of scholarly disagreement on thematter, there really seems to be no compelling reason for denying to the Ger-manic kings of the pre-Christian era in the territories south of the Baltic asacral status in some sense analogous to that which we know their neighbor-ing Celtic counterparts to have possessed, as also, if centuries later, their royalcounterparts in Scandinavia. “When the Germanic peoples entered the sphereof Christendom,” Otto Höfler has rightly insisted, “they did not arrive as a‘religionless’ multitude, but [as a people] shaped by an order of life in whichthe operation of religious forces and experiences can still be recognized.”47

So far as kingship is concerned, the operation of such forces can most clearlybe recognized in the care with which a whole series of Germanic peoples –from the Ostrogoths to the Anglo-Saxons – handed down genealogiestracing the ancestry of their royal families back to mythical divine progeni-tors. It can be recognized, too, in the notion of sacred qualities inherent inthe blood by virtue of which the election of kings was in fact limited tochoice from among the members of the divinely descended royal dynasties –those, in effect, who were possessed of the royal mana, or what German his-torians have called Geblütsrecht or Geblütsheiligkeit. How seriously this wastaken is strikingly illustrated by the story which Procopius relates concerningthe two successive embassies that the Heruli, then living in Roman territory,sent back to their original homeland in the Germanic north in order to findamong the members of the ancient royal family the king they needed. Thisking’s perceived legitimacy turned out to be so potent that the entire army ofthe rival Heruli king, whom the Roman Emperor Justinian had meanwhileseen fit to appoint, proceeded to desert him and to go over to the contenderpossessed of Geblütsheiligkeit.48

Gate of the Gods

37

The Ancient Near East: Kingship in Egypt and Mesopotamia(Third to First Millennium BCE)

In treating of institutions and ideologies possessed of nothing less than mil-lennial careers it would be all too easy to “retroject” later, highly developedforms into their related, but much more inchoate predecessors. This isparticularly easy in relation to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations,given the wholly extraordinary span of time during which they flourished,one which by comparison reduces the later lifespan of the Roman Empire toalmost provincial proportions. The insensible transformation of institutionsand ideologies from within; the repeated waves of invasions from without; inEgypt, the stately succession of dynasties punctuated by intermediate periodsof chaos and confusion; in Mesopotamia, the bewildering succession ofSumerian, Akkadian Kassite, Hurrian, Assyrian, Chaldean (or neo Babylon-ian) rulers – clearly a great deal of change must inevitably have occurredunder the carapace of institutional and ideological forms that from millennialdistance can easily seem static and timeless. And change was no less celestialthan terrestrial. Thus in Mesopotamia the Babylonian god Marduk cameeventually to be assigned some of the roles the Sumerians had earlierassigned to Enlil, son of the sky-god, Anu. And in Egypt, where the earliestkings succeeded in uniting what came to be called Upper and Lower Egypt,they came also in some of the earliest texts to be identified not only with thesky-god Horus but with both Horus and Seth in their capacities as the rivalgods of those “two lands.” Similarly, later on, under the Old Kingdom(2815–2298 BCE) and with the rise to prominence of the sun-cult amongthe priests of Heliopolis (situated near the capital of Memphis), the Egyptianking came to be identified in life also with the sun-god, Ré and entitled “Sonof Ré,” just as, at death, he was identified with Osiris, the god-king who haddied, been resurrected, and was linked with fertility and the restorative or“resurrective” function of the Nile.

Such shifts and developments are not to be ignored, and with them inmind I should acknowledge that what is said here will apply most accurately,so far as Egypt is concerned, to the Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom, and, so faras Mesopotamia is concerned, to the period of the Assyrian and Chaldean orneo-Babylonian empires (c.1300–539 BCE). At the same time, however, Ishould also acknowledge that one of the most striking features of these twoarchaic civilizations is the remarkable degree of continuity, stability, and uni-formity they both manifested across the longue dureé of their millennialhistories. During that extraordinary span of time they cherished and handeddown in Mesopotamia an ideological framework that was essentially ofarchaic Sumerian provenance, while stolidly maintaining in Egypt a cluster of

Gate of the Gods

38

fundamental belief-structures whose origins can be traced back to those earlyyears marked by the union and consolidation of the “two lands.”

Both countries, of course, disposed of complex and sophisticated sets ofinstitutions – legal, judicial, administrative, bureaucratic, military, and priestly.All of these institutions reflected an extensive delegation of functions andauthority to subordinate officials, with the institution of the palace growingin importance across time in Mesopotamia, as also did the office of tjaty (orvizier) and nomarch (or provincial governor) in Egypt. All were subordinatedultimately to the king whose powers, in Mesopotamia, were extensive, and,in Egypt, all-embracing – so much so, indeed, that person, rank, status,liberty, even “private” property were all understood as royal “gifts.” In theabsence of more than a handful of surviving legal and administrative docu-ments, about the exercise of that all-embracing power and the day-to-dayfunctioning of the Egyptian kingship we know very little. About the func-tioning of the Mesopotamian monarchy, at least in its later Assyrian form andfrom the time of Hammurabi onwards (c.1792–58 BCE), we are much betterinformed. Royal correspondence, collections of laws, and official documentsopen a revealing window on the king’s wide-ranging and detailed concernwith governmental activities. In effect, it has been said, the sources permit usto see the Mesopotamian king “in active control of even subordinate officialsstationed in distant cities of his empire, . . . investigating quite trivial com-plaints and disputes among the humbler classes of his subjects, and oftensending back a case for retrial or for further report.”49

In this respect the contrast evident between the Egyptian and Meso-potamian version of kingship may conceivably be, as much as anything else,an artifact produced by the differential survival rate in the two countries ofthe pertinent documentation. Whatever the commonalities, however, andwe will touch upon them later, fundamental differences between the twokingships certainly did exist. From Rekhmire, the vizier of Thutmose III(c.1490–1436 BCE), has come down to us a classic definition of the Egypt-ian kingship, one that reflects enduring Egyptian attitudes towards theirrulers. “What is the king of Upper and Lower Egypt?” he asked. And theanswer: “He is a god by whose dealings one lives, the father and mother of allmen, alone by himself without an equal.” The king, in effect, was a godincarnate whose coronation, it has well been said, was not merely “an apothe-osis” but rather, “an epiphany”.50

The Egyptian kingship, then, was divine. It dated back to the very creationof the universe. It was embedded eternally in the cosmic order itself. Just ashis dead father was identified with the god Osiris, the reigning king was at thesame time the “Son of Ré,” that is, royal successor to the sun-god, and theliving incorporation of the sky-god, Horus. His very divinity precluded any

Gate of the Gods

39

Gate of the Gods

40

Figure 4 Egypt. The gold mask and trappings of the mummy of Tutankhamun. (JürgenLiepe)

direct approach to his person and even any direct reference to him. To avoidthe latter, resort was had to circumlocutions of one sort or another, promi-nent among them (and note the way in which we refer to the “WhiteHouse”) per-aa or “the Great House,” from which our word “Pharaoh”derives. In Mesopotamia, in contrast, where the institution of kingship hadbeen forged during the third millennium BCE in the crucible of internecineconflict among a congeries of city-states, the king, or lugal, was no more thana man. He was, nonetheless, a very “great man” (the literal meaning of theSumerian lugal), a priestly figure, no incarnation of the gods, admittedly, butrepresentative of them and wielding an authority that they were understoodto have delegated to him.

Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings were often depicted as warrior kings,heroic leaders in battle, and we know some of them, certainly to have flour-ished in that role. But perhaps the most frequent and most significant battlesin which they took part were symbolic ones, ritual battles of cosmogonicimport. For whatever the differences between the two monarchies, and wehave seen them to be real, both were underpinned by the enduring adhesionof their peoples to styles or variants of the cosmic religiosity.

Their most important responsibilities, then, extended far beyond what wetoday would classify as the political. Thus when we read that in Egypt Amen-hotep III (c.1398–1344 BCE) strove “to make the country flourish as inprimeval times by the designs of Maat” (a word usually rendered as “truth”or “right order”), we have to realize that what maat denoted was not simplyhuman or societal justice but, rather, “the inherent structure of the cosmos,of which justice is an integral part.” It was personified as a goddess – daugh-ter “of the sun-god Ré whose regular circuit is the most striking manifesta-tion of . . . [that] . . . established cosmic order.” The rotation of the seasons,the annual rise of the Nile, the reinvigoration of the soil and the abundanceof the crops which that ensured – all were understood to depend on thePharaoh’s faithful discharge of his ritual responsibilities. Playing a central roleat all of the major agrarian rituals, “he was the god who brought fertility toEgypt.” At his specific command, committed to writing and cast upon itswaters, the Nile began each year to rise. “The Nile is at his service,” it wassaid, “and he opens its caverns to give life to Egypt.”51

The kings of Mesopotamia were called upon to shoulder similar responsi-bilities, though given the less predictable and frequently hostile physicalenvironment in which they lived as well as the less exalted status which theythemselves enjoyed, a greater anxiety attended upon their efforts. For them,the link between their person and the fertility of the land was a less directone; it stemmed not from their own divinity but from the success with whichthey discharged the task of looking after the gods on behalf of their people.

Gate of the Gods

41

This they did via a formidable cycle of cult festivals, rites, and offerings, oneof the oldest of them being a fertility rite. Linked with the accession of a newking, it involved a sacred coupling of king and priestess, taking the roles,respectively, of the shepherd-god Dumuzi-Tammuz and the fertility-goddessInanna, a marriage, in effect, “of the creative powers of Spring.”52

The Sumerians and their successors often built their temples on imposingziggurats or artificial mountains, and the Egyptians characteristically situatedthe holy of holies in their temples in a high place raised above the entrance.In so doing, both were echoing the symbolism of the cosmic or primevalmountain which, at the moment of creation, had emerged from the waters ofchaos to become the center of the world. And it was the purpose of some ofthe most striking of the rites in which the Egyptian and Mesopotamian kingsplayed a central role to “reactualize” that cosmogonic moment. In Egypt,the creation was ascribed to various gods, but quintessentially to the sun-godRé, who, prior to his creation of the primeval or cosmic mountain, couldbe quoted as having said: “Only after I came into being did all that wascreated come into being. . . . The sky had not come into being; the earth hadnot come into being. . . . I found no place where I could stand.” “Theanalogy with Ré,” Frankfort notes, “is stressed especially at the coronation[of the Pharaoh], which can be regarded as the creation of a new epoch, . . . asituation, therefore, which partakes of the quality of the creation of the uni-verse.”53 In Mesopotamia, similarly, the king played a central role in theprotracted New Year’s Festival celebrated at Babylon. On that occasion andat that city, the “gate,” after all, “of the gods,” was solemnly recited and in itsentirety the great Babylonian creation myth, the Enûma Elish. The festivalevoked, therefore, the analogy between the renewal or “recreation” whicheach New Year involved, and solemnly “reactualized” the cosmogonic strug-gle between cosmic order and primordial chaos – rendered as the greatvictory of the valiant king-god Marduk over “raging Tiamat,” the terrifyingsea-monster who represented the watery chaos. And it should be noted thatthe latter’s very name is cognate to the Hebrew word tehom – “the deep”referred to in Genesis 1:2, itself part of the priestly account of creation woveninto the post-exilic redaction of that book, and claimed by some scholars tohave, in fact, been modeled on the opening lines of the Enûma Elish.

With that putative bridge between a remote Near Eastern civilization longsince dead and the book that has endured on into the Western present as therevered focus of a living religious tradition, we must bring our series of casestudies to a close. These brief studies will have served their purpose if, whileillustrating the varied forms of sacral kingship that have contrived to flourishacross the millennia and around the globe, they have also succeeded in con-

Gate of the Gods

42

veying the degree to which one or other variant of what I have called thecosmic religiosity functioned throughout as the ideology undergirding allthose forms. It is a matter of no little significance that that should have beentrue not only of the forms of kingship native to Egypt and Mesopotamia butalso, in some measure at least, of those that came to the fore in the easternMediterranean region as a whole during the late antique era of cultural syn-cretism and cosmopolitan empire. For that is the background against whichboth Hellenistic and Hebraic ideas of kingship must be seen if they are prop-erly to be understood. To those ideas we must now turn, as we begin theprocess of tightening the orbit of our inquiry and shifting the focus of atten-tion from the global to the regional, from the world as a whole to theexperience of Europe and the West.

Gate of the Gods

43

As we begin the process of shifting the focus of attention from the world atlarge to Europe and the West, while we must necessarily dwell on Hellenic,Hellenistic, Judaic, and, in some measure, Muslim roots, in so doing we haveto be careful. So far, at least, as patterns of kingship are concerned, we wouldbe unwise simply to assume that we are destined to encounter any truly deci-sive departures from the archaic pattern of cosmic kingship that was sodeeply entrenched in the ancient Near East and, during the late antique eraof cultural syncretism and cosmopolitan empires, so widely diffused through-out the eastern Mediterranean region as a whole. Given the ubiquity andlongevity of that pattern and of the cosmic religiosity that undergirded it, it isappropriate once more to insist, as we did with reference to the world ofGerman paganism, that the burden of proof should properly be placed onthe shoulders of those who argue for radical discontinuity or marked excep-tionalism rather than of those whose interpretative instincts resonate to themore chastened frequencies of merely evolutionary change. If, methodolog-ically speaking, that is a justifiable posture to adopt when approaching thepolitical commitments of the classical or “Hellenic” period and of the “Hel-lenistic” centuries stretching from the ascendancy of Alexander the Great(d. 323 BCE) to the birth of Christ, it will surely be appropriate also whenwe come to address the Israelite kingship that emerged at the start of the firstmillennium BCE, and no less appropriate when we attempt to come to termswith the comparably uneasy notions of kingship prevalent later on among thefollowers of those other “Abrahamic” religions, Christianity, and Islam. Thatsaid, it is with Hellas that we must begin.

2Royal Saviors and ShepherdsHellenistic, Roman, Biblical, and

Islamic Views of Kingship

44

Hellenistic and Roman Sacrality

Of Plato, Mircea Eliade once perceptively remarked that “he could beregarded as the outstanding philosopher of ‘primitive mentality,’ that is, asthe thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to themodes of life and behavior of archaic humanity.”1 Anyone who has readPlato’s great dialogue, the Timaeus, in conjunction with the BabylonianEnûma Elish or the Egyptian Memphite Theology (all three of them creationmyths embracing a theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony) would, Isuspect, be inclined to concur in that appraisal. Recognizing how often thelong, retrospective Western engagement with the experience of the classicalpolis has lapsed into rampant anachronism, we might well be wise to approachthat experience, as Eliade’s insight suggests, rather from the perspective ofwhat went before than from what came to be made of it in later centuries.

Given the fragmentary nature of the available evidence, this is, of course,easier to say than to do. And yet, in the context of the history of kingship, atleast, and despite any affinity we may well feel for their republican way of life,it would be improper to regard the Greek city-states of the classical era ashaving marked any truly decisive break with the archaic sacral pattern sodeeply ingrained in the ancient Near East and in greater or lesser degreethroughout the eastern Mediterranean world. By the third millennium BCEa complex civilization had emerged on the island of Crete, which was linkedcommercially not only with the Greek mainland but also with Egypt and AsiaMinor. By the mid-second millennium, under the influence initially ofMinoan Crete, a civilized way of life had emerged also on the Greek main-land. It pivoted on a group of strongly fortified towns, the most prominentamong them being Mycenae, like Crete a center of maritime commercialenterprise reaching out across the whole eastern Mediterranean. Andalthough the great Homeric epics (in the form in which they have comedown to us) are usually dated to around 750–650 BCE, scholars have com-monly, if variously, argued that the world so vividly evoked in the Iliad andOdyssey is an older one. It may be, they have said, that it harks back to theMycenaean Age of c.1400–1150 BCE, or, alternatively, that of the later“Dark Age” of Greek migration (c.1050–900 BCE) which witnessed thedestruction of the Mycenaean civilization, or, yet again, that it reflects somecomplex amalgam evocative of conditions prevailing in both of those ages.

Whatever the case, it does seem that the political organization of both theMinoan and Mycenaean civilizations hinged upon a form of sacral monarchywhich had much in common with that to be found broadcast right across theancient Near East.2 The Homeric kings, though their power was compara-tively limited, are portrayed as hereditary kings, descendants of Zeus, himself

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

45

viewed as supreme king of the gods. They not only led their people in battlebut served also as their chief priests, performing sacrifices on their behalf. Sointegral a part of their royal status were their sacral functions, indeed, thatwhen, from the eighth century BCE onwards, the kings were in most placesnudged to one side (Macedonia being a notable exception) and aristocraticpoleis or city-states came to dominate the Hellenic political landscape, “thenew states continued to regard the divine cult as one of the main bases onwhich the state should be built.”3

As a result, it was now necessary for the chief magistrates to execute thepriestly duties discharged formerly by the kings, and Plato himself notes thatin some states – Athens being but one “striking example” – a special promi-nence was accorded to a particular officer who still bore the title of “king”(archon basileus or king-archon) and who was charged with the task of per-forming “the most solemn ancestral sacrifices” of the polis, in this respectfunctioning as “the heir of the Mycenaean priest-king.”4 In some of the city-states, moreover, the degree of continuity with the Mycenaean religio-political tradition is underlined not only by the fact that such religiousceremonies were still being performed by a kingly figure, but also by the spe-cific types of ceremony being performed and by the particular sites at whichthey took place. Thus in many of the city-states the palaces of the formerkings became, or were replaced on the same sites, by temples of the city’sgod. At Athens itself, Aristotle tells us in his Constitution of Athens, thereremained a king or archon basileus who, among his other duties, supervisedthe Eleusinian mysteries with the assistance of four “curators,” two of themchosen, respectively, from the Eleusinian Eumolpidai and the EleusinianKerukes – old priestly families which may have been of royal descent. At theDionysian festival of the Anthesteria, moreover, the king-archon’s wife wasstill required to contract a sacred marriage with the god Dionysus in theBoukolion, a building on the Acropolis which had once been the royal resi-dence.5 It was possibly on this occasion, E.O. James comments,

that her marriage with the king was celebrated, and its object seems tohave been to renew and ensure the processes of fertility over which Diony-sus had control, as in the other sacred marriages of the king and queen inthe seasonal ritual.

And his conclusion? Nothing other than the claim that

the widespread and very deeply-rooted fundamental theme of the sacralkingship persisted in Greece in myth and ritual long after the monarchyhad ceased to function as a political institution in the city-states.6

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

46

That being so, the ease with which during the Hellenistic era a return wasmade, albeit in more philosophical guise, to something roughly akin to thearchaic pattern of sacral kingship hardly calls for the type of elaborate expla-nation which historians have frequently felt obliged to proffer. With thetriumph of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great (336–323 BCE) overthe Persian empire and its incorporation along with other territories into avast Hellenistic empire, belief in the divinity or sacrality of emperors andkings came to exert a profound influence over the whole late classical world.Rooted already in the several successor kingdoms to Alexander’s empire itwent on, further to the west, to establish itself in the emerging empire ofRome. And it was able to do so precisely because it came not as an alien het-erodoxy but as a return to a form of politics the ideological underpinnings ofwhich had never fully been dismantled. That was no less true of Greece inthe fourth century BCE than it was to be, later on, of Rome. The celebratedrefusal in 327 BCE of the Greek and Macedonian soldiers at Alexander’scoronation to perform the traditional Persian proskynesis, or act of obeisancein the presence of the god-king, can be explained as readily by the fact thatthey were being confronted with what was to them an innovation of alienPersian provenance as by any unambiguous antipathy to the ruler-cult assuch. A strong case, indeed, can be made for believing that the idea ofdivinizing a living ruler as well as the very ruler-cult itself were by no meansunfamiliar to them, but were rooted in traditional modes of Greek hero- andancestor-worship. They drew sustenance also from the charismatic charactercommonly attributed to members of the Macedonian royal dynasty whichin Alexander’s own day still continued to trace its line of descent back toHeracles, son of Zeus.7 More surprisingly, perhaps, even during the age ofthe polis, such notions and traditions lurked on the fringes of the reallyquite extensive discussion of the strengths of the monarchical governmentalideal that rumbled on at Athens during the course of the fourth centuryBCE and was fed by the contributions of such notable writers as Xenophon,Theophrastus, and (above all) Isocrates. While, then, archaic associations ofthe king’s ritual performances with the fertility of the land and the abun-dance of crops had begun to fade, other echoes of the old cosmic religiositywere still to be heard.

Certainly, in the Hellenistic notion of the state as an analogue of the uni-verse, with the king himself as an incarnate epiphaneia or manifestation of thedivine ordering logos (or reason conceived to be immanent in the universeand analogous to the reasoning power in man), the Greeks themselves fash-ioned out of Pythagorean and Platonic as well as oriental materials their ownmore consciously philosophized version of sacral kingship. Bearing “thesame relation to the state as God to the world,” and the state being “in the

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

47

same ratio to the world as the king is to God” (Diotogenes),8 the king wasconceived as “a dynamic and personal revelation of deity,” a “living law”(nomos empsychos; lex animata), “himself the state, its constitution and itslink with the world order.” That vision was reflected in the writings of suchHellenistic theorists as Diotogenes and Ps.-Ecphantus the Phythagorean. Itwas reflected also in those of Plutarch later on, a man well acquainted withHellenistic political literature in general, as also with some pertinent writingsnow lost to us. It was reflected again in the claims of the Hellenistic kings,Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Parthian alike, to be themselves, the “shepherds”and “saviors” of their peoples and to be deserving of such elevated titles as“Benefactor,” “Mediator,” “Theos Epiphanes” – “god manifest” or, perhaps,“god incarnate.”9 It was a vision of regality that was destined for centuries toawaken potent memories in the Western political consciousness and to do so,above all, because it had proved capable of exerting a profound and progres-sively deepening influence upon Roman legal and political thinking.

That influence, and the general process of Hellenization of which it wasbut a part, were to reach their peak in the third century CE. By that time,however, they had already been at work for several centuries – from the latterpart of the first century BCE, certainly, perhaps earlier. Even Octavian, reactnegatively though he might to Mark Antony’s embrace of Hellenistic monar-chy, did not prove himself to be altogether immune to the lure of suchHellenistic ideas. It is conceivable that his adoption as a praenomen of thetitle imperator (which we translate as “emperor”) was modeled on the usewhich Hellenistic rulers were accustomed to make of basileus (king) as a firstname. Similarly, in his decision to attach his official residence to the templesof Apollo and Venus we may again detect signs of eastern influence. Cer-tainly, in the subsequent growth of the imperial cult and of the practice ofdivinizing emperors, that eastern influence remains unquestionably apparent.

As early as the first century BCE it was becoming commonplace for theHellenized peoples of the eastern provinces of the empire to pay divinehonors to their Roman proconsuls. In those provinces Julius Caesar and evenOctavian were worshipped in their own lifetimes, and Cicero tells us that asproconsul of Cilicia he himself was hard put to prevent such honors beingpaid to him.10 But as time went on and as Hellenistic and oriental influenceswere felt ever more forcefully in the western provinces, reservations of thattype became increasingly unfashionable. To the reserve of Cicero succeededultimately the emperor Diocletian’s eager sponsorship and conscious orien-talization of what had become, by the end of the third century CE, a wellestablished imperial cult. As Cochrane reminded us a full half-century ago,that cult could hardly have rooted itself so firmly in Roman soil had it comeas something “foreign or exotic.”11 In republican Rome, as in Athens, the

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

48

break with the archaic pattern of sacral kingship had never been complete.The very foundation of the commonwealth remained in some profoundsense what we would call “religious.” Although “king” had become a dirtyword and the era of kingship in a “political” sense was gone, it had still beenfelt necessary for religio-political purposes to retain the office and title ofking in the form of the priestly rex sacrorum. And when Caesar Augustusattached to his office of princeps (“first citizen”) the priestly function andtitle of pontifex maximus (“supreme pontiff” – an old republican office) it isconceivable that he was moved as much by memories of the cultic role of theancient Roman kings as by any specifically Hellenistic practice.12

Whatever the specific source of the thinking that lay behind it, it is impor-tant to recognize that the practice whereby the Roman Senate could chooseto deify an emperor after his death is not to be dismissed anachronistically as“mere ritual” or a “transparently political” gesture possessed of no truly reli-gious significance. Nor indeed should the obligation to perform publicworship to “Rome and Augustus” or the elaborate public ceremonies involv-ing the consecratio or apotheosis of deceased emperors be similarly dismissed.In his novel I, Claudius, it is true, Robert Graves was able to have somegood derisive fun at the expense of the consecratio, and viewing (with him)the whole ritual as something of a charade, historians when writing about theperiod have tended generally to bracket it and to focus instead on what theyclearly view as the “realities” of power – war, politics, administration, anddiplomacy. But in this they may in some measure have missed the point. For,it turns out, contemporaries appear to have viewed the consecratio “withcomplete seriousness,” and it constituted nothing less than “the central focusof imperial ideology at Rome for [no less than] three hundred years.”13

A similar seriousness attached to emperor-worship, the imperial cult whichseems to have reflected, especially in the eastern provinces, a genuine piety –though, of course, a piety of the antique civic mode.14 Its eventual spreadthroughout the empire owed less, it seems, to governmental enforcementthan to popular sentiment. If it was, indeed, a political act, it was political,not in the modern and (historically-speaking) impoverished sense of thatterm, but in the older, broader, more inclusive sense that bore the clear, con-tinuing imprint of the archaic religio-political vision. City-state, republic,Hellenistic kingdom, Roman empire – all of them still remained somethingmore than “states” in the modern sense. Despite our anachronistic inclina-tion to cynical dismissal of the old civic piety, political thinking and practicein the classical world continued to acknowledge no real distinction betweenthe political and the religious. The loyalty men owed to their state wasequally a loyalty to their civic gods, and that loyalty was in general conceivedto be an ultimate loyalty from which there could be no appeal to any higher

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

49

norm. If the irruption into that world of the biblical religions was eventuallyto call into question that age-old way of thinking, it had that effect only cen-turies later, and long after Judaism and Christianity alike had first provedthemselves to be in some degree responsive to the allure of the archaiccosmic religiosity and had been drawn accordingly and irresistibly into thestrong magnetic field it continued to exert.

Abrahamic Unease (i): The Israelite Monarchy

By the eleventh century BCE, after the most recent of a devastating series ofbarbarian invasions from the north, the powers which had long maneuveredwarily for advantage in the Fertile Crescent stretching from the Sinai penin-sula to the headwaters of the Euphrates were either removed from the sceneor reduced momentarily to comparative impotence. Egypt and Assyria wereleft in badly weakened condition and the mighty Hittite empire had beenutterly destroyed. In Canaan or southern Syria, conditions were ripe for theemergence of an array of petty independent states or kingdoms. And thekingdom that is of concern to us is that of the Hebrews, a semi-nomadic pas-toral people, an entity which came into being just before the beginning ofthe first millennium BCE.

In the twelfth century the Hebrews had begun to migrate from the sur-rounding desert into Canaan and to settle among the agrarian populationlong since established there. By the eleventh century the strength of theirpresence had become such as to lead them into a bitter struggle for controlof Canaan with the sea-faring Philistines established in city-states strungalong the Mediterranean coast. And it was in response to the demand fororganization and cooperation evoked by that great struggle that theybegan to relinquish their old traditions of tribal independence and, undertwo successive warrior leaders, Saul and David, to accept a form of monarchy.During the long reign of Solomon, David’s son and immediate successor, anattempt appears to have been made to develop the Hebrew kingdom, nowpivoting on the cultic center of Jerusalem, into something more closely akinto a despotism of the traditionally Mesopotamian type. The attempt,however, failed, and to the united or confederated kingdom succeeded uponSolomon’s death in 933 BCE two smaller entities – the kingdom of Israel (orEphraim) to the north, with its capital at Samaria, and that of Judah to thesouth, with its capital at Jerusalem. The subsequent revival of Assyrian powermeant that their days would prove to be numbered. In 722 BCE theAssyrians conquered Israel. In 586 BCE their Chaldean or neo-Babyloniansuccessors destroyed Judah, deporting many of its more substantial citizenryto Babylon. There they endured in exile until 538 BCE, somehow surviving

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

50

as a distinct (and distinctive) people capable of handing down to posterityits most enduring legacy: the remarkable collection of narratives, laws,poems, and meditations which together form the Jewish Bible/Christian OldTestament.

In the context of the ancient Near East at large all of this amounted tovery small beer indeed. That in the narrow compass of this essay we are com-pelled to devote any space at all to the Israelite kingdoms speaks less to theirintrinsic political importance or the significance of their essentially provincialsecular histories, than to the powerfully formative influence that the biblicalaccount of their religious beliefs, hopes, and yearnings was destined to exertover European and Western modes of life and thought. In a profound sensethat is not true of the histories of the other peoples of the ancient Near East,our history in the West is continuous with the history of the ancient Hebrews– or, rather, with their own retroactive and providentialist understanding oftheir remarkable odyssey through time. So much so, indeed (traditional his-tories of political thought to the contrary), that our own history is not fullycomprehensible unless we undertake to come to terms with that singularfact.

To make that attempt, however, is no easy undertaking, and especially so ifone’s concern (as is ours) is with the Israelite kingship. In trying to make his-torical sense of that institution one has to grope one’s way through a fog oflater theological commentary that can easily screen from us the differing his-torical contexts in which the various “books” of the Bible were produced.One has to wrestle also with extremely intricate problems concerning theprecise dating of the narratives in the “historical” books of the JewishBible/Christian Old Testament that speak to the introduction of kingshipinto Israel. And, further than that, one has to take into account the degree towhich those historical narratives may themselves have been shaped at thetime of their composition or later redaction by considerations essentially the-ological in nature.

With those craven caveats duly posted, let me boldly suggest that the bestpoint of entry into discussion of the Israelite monarchy is along the trajectoryfollowed in the mid-twentieth century by the English and Scandinavianscholars whose names were associated with what are commonly referred toas the “myth and ritual” and “Uppsala” schools of interpretation.15 Bothschools were intent on making the case that the ideology which undergirdedthe Israelite kingship was in its essentials the same as that which we have seento lie behind the Egyptian and Mesopotamian kingship and which extendedalso to other regions of the ancient Near East. Not least among those regionswas the land of Canaan among whose inhabitants the Hebrews settled andwith whose religious and institutional forms they came into intimate contact.

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

51

The evidence available to support that case, it should be acknowledged, isquite substantial and not lightly to be dismissed.

Thus, many of the attributes ascribed to the coming Messiah and the epi-thets heaped upon him by Isaiah and the author usually referred to asDeutero-Isaiah – righteousness, love of justice, “Mighty God,” “EverlastingFather,” “Servant of God,” and so on – are now said to be of Sumerian,Babylonian, or Egyptian provenance.16 Similarly, persuasive parallels havebeen drawn between Deutero-Isaiah’s suffering Servant of God, a kingly,Messianic figure destined not only to “raise up the tribes of Jacob and torestore the survivors of Israel” but also to atone by his death for the sins ofothers, and the role which the Babylonian king played on the day of atone-ment that formed part of the New Year’s Festival. For on that occasion,acting as the representative of his people and as “Servant of God” (a titleexplicitly accorded to him) he sought ritually to expiate the wrongdoings ofhis people.17

I do not choose these illustrations at random. The relationship betweenthe Messianic motif and the Hebraic or the later Christian political vision ismore direct than it might at first seem. If the epithets which the prophetsapplied to the Messiah or the imagery and symbols associated with himbetray parallels with Egyptian and Babylonian court style, they do so becausesome of them, while conveying or being susceptible of an eschatologicalmeaning, were actually applied to or associated originally with the real-lifepre-exilic kings of Israel and Judah. Of the developments in Old Testamentstudies over the course of the past century the one that is most pertinent toour concern here is the discovery that a whole series of the psalms (thelanguage and imagery of which echo through Deutero-Isaiah) together forma distinct group. Those psalms, which have since come to be known col-lectively as the “royal” psalms, are not “original expressions of personal orcollective piety written in post-exilic or perhaps even post-Maccabaean times,but derive from hymns, liturgies, prayers, and oracles to be used in the sacredcult of the pre-exilic [Hebrew] monarchy.”18 As a result, whether or not theyare inclined to take at face value the extraordinary statement addressed to theking in Psalm 45:6 (“Thy throne, O God, endures for ever and ever”); somescholars have certainly taken the evidence yielded by these royal psalms, aswell as additional evidence gleaned from the historical books of the Old Tes-tament, as disclosing the lineaments of a pre-exilic Hebrew monarchy in styleand status well-nigh indistinguishable from the other sacral monarchies of theancient Near East.

A couple of examples must suffice. In the first place, in this context it istempting to attach a heightened significance to the fact that the great templewhich Solomon erected with Phoenician help in Jerusalem reproduced the

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

52

cosmological symbolism we have seen to be common to the temples androyal palaces of the ancient Near East and elsewhere – a symbolism in accor-dance with which the structure of the temple reflects in microcosm thestructure of the macrocosm. Similarly, and in the second place, SigmundMowinckel and others have detected in the autumnal festival at Jerusalem aNew Year’s Festival comparable to that of the Babylonians. At that festival, orso they argue, there occurred a symbolic repetition by the king of the work ofcreation in which Yahweh triumphed once more over the primeval forces ofchaos, and, having been ritually proclaimed as universal king, showed to hisfollowers “that he was prepared to restore their fortunes in the year that layahead, . . . in particular, to bestow upon His people the gift of rain and all theblessings of fertility.” In the ritual of that festival, they further claim, theHebrew king played a cultic role comparable to that played by his Babyloniancounterpart, an absolutely central role as superhuman representative of hispeople, sacral mediator between them and Yahweh, “the channel throughwhich the divine blessings flow to the people.”19

It has to be acknowledged, however, that such attempts to draw firm paral-lels between the autumn festival at Jerusalem and the Babylonian New Year’sFestival have since been subjected to severe evidentiary criticism. There is,moreover, considerable dispute about the nature and extent of any priestlyrole to be ascribed to the pre-exilic Hebrew kings, and few scholars, indeed,would now be tempted to read Psalm 45:6 as attributing divine status tothose kings.20 Mowinckel, moreover, has been criticized on the grounds that“he interprets the Old Testament religion as a whole by working inwardsfrom the wide circle of a primitive and general Semitic Umwelt [milieu],instead of outwards from the centre of the prophetic consciousness.” And hehimself was led to concede somewhat to such criticisms by acknowledgingthat whatever the “phenomenological ‘parallels’” detectable between notionsof kingship in Israel and in the ancient Near East as a whole (and clearly thereare many), “the essential question” that has to be asked “is what significancehas been imparted to a borrowed idea in its new context, what the religion ofIsrael has made of it.”21

Ask that question, of course, and fundamental differences begin toemerge between the Hebrew political experience and that of the Babylonian,Egyptian, Canaanite, and other peoples in the ancient Near East. And, in thecontexts of world history and of the development of specifically Westernnotions of kingship during the Latin Middle Ages, it is to those differencesrather than to all the admitted similarities that true significance attaches. Andhere, I would suggest, a pertinent parallel is to be found in the way inwhich the post-exilic priestly redactors transformed the “priestly account” ofcreation (Genesis 1:1–2:4A). The parallel material on which they drew to

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

53

inspire them in their work appears to have been drawn from the verses of theBabylonian Enûma Elish, but unlike the latter the Genesis text is nowheremerely “allusive, ‘symbolic,’ or figuratively poetic.” Instead of featuring abewildering succession of gods, good and evil, the Genesis account “is dom-inated by the monotheistic concept in the absolute sense of the term.”22 Itasserts (or assumes), in effect, not simply the oneness of God, but also histranscendence and omnipotence – themes that run through the pages ofthe Old Testament and find, of course, particularly powerful and eloquentexpression in the pages of Deutero-Isaiah. As a result it involves also theassertion, in Kierkegaard’s words, of “an infinite qualitative difference”between God and the world. That world, by simple fiat or an untrammeledexercise of his will, he had drawn out of nothingness (or so Genesis cameeventually to be interpreted) and into being. Hence, whatever the use madeof Babylonian materials, in the priestly account they are subordinated to theexigencies of an understanding of the divine differing radically from that tobe found in the Enûma Elish or the other creation myths of the ancient NearEast. Hence, too, the concomitant reshaping of the very notion of creationitself into something much more radical than the archaic notion of the impo-sition of cosmos (or order) upon some sort of preexisting chaos.

The link between the Genesis creation account and the ideas and practicesattaching to Hebrew kingship extends, moreover, well beyond a pertinentparallelism in the ways in which attitudes and notions absorbed from the sur-rounding Near Eastern cultures were gradually, under the transformativeimpact of the Yahwist religion, transmuted into something very different. Itextends also, in fact, to the substantive. The biblical notion of creation, thatis to say, and the notion of God as one, transcendent and omnipotent whichit both presupposed and entailed, inevitably imposed severe limits on thedegree of sacrality that could properly be accorded to any truly Israelite king.By destroying the archaic sense that there existed a consubstantiality betweenGod, nature, and man it de-divinized or de-sacralized the two last. As aresult, it had a desacralizing effect also on human society and on the politicalinstitutions necessary for the maintenance of that society. In negating thefundamental primitive or archaic notion of a divine continuum linkinghumankind with nature and the state with the cosmos, it undercut as wellwhat we have been calling “the cosmic religiosity,” itself the very foundationfor the archaic pattern of divine or sacral kingship and the understanding ofthe state as “the embodiment of the cosmic totality.” And, in undercuttingthat pattern, it shifted the arena in which the relationship between the divineand the human is played out from that dominated by the cyclic rhythms ofnature in which “there is nothing new under the sun” to that constituted bythe open-ended succession of unique events in time that we call “history.” In

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

54

that arena it envisaged the millennial unfolding across the unpredictable vast-nesses of time of a salvific dialogue between the uncreated and transcendentGod on the one hand and, on the other, the human creatures who owedtheir very existence to his inexplicable generosity. In that dialogue kings wereassigned no inevitable or stable role. The central players, instead, were Godhimself and his chosen and covenanted people.

It should be emphasized, however, that such judgments are comparativein nature. If, in retrospect, there is indeed a marked contrast between thedeveloped religio-politico vision of the Hebrews and that of the surroundingpeoples, it was to take centuries before the nature of the discontinuityinvolved was fully to be comprehended. There seems no good reason, forexample, to deny that the pre-exilic Hebrew kings performed some functionsof a priestly nature. Even if we were content to indulge in anachronism, wewould encounter great difficulty if we tried to distinguish in any of theIsraelite regimes, whether pre- or post-exilic, discrete “religious” and “polit-ical” spheres analogous to the modern categories of church and state. It isthe case, then, that we have to be careful not to exaggerate the extent towhich (and the speed with which) the ancient Hebrews actually broke awayfrom the archaic sacral pattern of things. Nonetheless, it is extremely unlikelythat even the pre-exilic kings laid claim to any “divine” status. Nowhere inthe Old Testament, Mowinckel conceded, do we meet “with a ‘metaphysical’unity of Yahweh and the king or a really mythological idea of the king’s rela-tionship with Yahweh.”23 Had such an idea been advanced, that fact wouldsurely have been reflected in the form of yet another charge of blasphemyembedded in the protracted polemic which the prophets directed againsttheir kings. And the very existence and strength of that prophetic polemicitself reflects, after all, the peculiarly uneasy status of the Hebrew kingshipand the fragility of its relationship with the divine.

The presence of two different attitudes towards the kingship in those partsof the books of Samuel concerned with its introduction into Israel discloses,perhaps better than anything else, this fundamental uneasiness in the positionof the Hebrew kings and goes some way towards illuminating its nature. Onthe one hand, God is described as having readily accepted the popular desirefor kingship and as having anointed Saul to be “ruler over his people Israel”(1 Samuel 10:1; 12:1–5). On the other, he is portrayed as having regarded thedemand of the Israelites that they should have a king to govern them and fighttheir battles so that they might be “like other nations” as nothing less than abetrayal, a quasi-blasphemous demand derogating from his own eternal king-ship. After all, the Lord tells Samuel, by that request “they have not rejectedyou, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Samuel 8:4–9,19–22).

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

55

This marked ambivalence in attitude towards the kingship is by no meansunique to Samuel. It is evident at many points in the Old Testament. “Theymade kings,” said the Lord to Hosea, “but not through me, they set upprinces, but without my knowledge” (Hosea 8:4). The religious syncretismconsequent upon the Israelite penetration into Canaan, the degree to whichthe Hebrew monarchy did indeed become like that “of other nations” –the focus of a royal cult, the mediatorial pivot of a state envisaged as “theembodiment of the cosmic totality” – these things (much emphasized by theadherents to the “Myth and Ritual” school) seem increasingly to have stimu-lated among the Israelites themselves criticism, first, of royal behavior whenkings went “whoring” after the alien fertility gods of the Canaanites, and then,eventually, of the monarchy itself. As a result, that very institution came to beportrayed as a failure, a great aberration, a foreign importation incompatiblewith the Hebrew religious vision, a veritable betrayal of the covenant betweenGod and his chosen people, something irreconcilable with the supreme king-ship of Yahweh himself. Again and again, prophetic voices were raiseddefending the true kingship of Yahweh against those deluded human upstartswho, worshipping in the “high places,” sought to “ascend to heaven,” to“raise their throne above the stars of God,” to make themselves “like the MostHigh” (Isaiah 14:12–14). And the hostility thus engendered, enshrined in thewritings (or redactions) of exilic or post-exilic times, survived the destructionof the kingship in Judah no less than in Israel. It informed the thinking of theHebrews to such a degree indeed, that not even the revival of the monarchy in103 BCE could overcome it or rally the support of the entire nation behindthe (non-Davidic) Hasmonean kings who, by their military prowess, had beenable to revive the old kingdom of Judah and, for more than half a century, toguarantee its renewed independence.

Despite any earlier flirtation with the cosmic religiosity and cosmic king-ship, then, the Hebrews finally resisted their blandishments. The Hebraicconception of God and the understanding of creation that flowed from itwere determinative in undermining the structure of the archaic sacral pattern.But they were not by themselves strong enough to destroy it. If the archaicpattern of divine or sacral kingship was excluded, it was excluded, after all, inthe name of kingly divinity. And Yahweh alone being recognized eventually astruly king, the Israelite governmental ideal remained what the HellenisticJewish writer Flavius Josephus was later on to label as “theocracy.”

The point is an important one, and for more than one reason. Amongother things, some measure of insight into the history of the idea of the king-ship of Yahweh is vital for an understanding of the political attitudes one findsexpressed later on in the New Testament, and especially of those clusteringaround the notion of the “Kingdom of God” or “Kingdom of Heaven.” As

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

56

suggested earlier, the relationship between the Messianic motif and theChristian as well as Hebraic political vision is more direct than at first it mightseem. Side by side with the growing sense that the reign of the earthlyIsraelite kings derogated from the supreme kingship of Yahweh lay the antic-ipation of the latter’s final victory over his enemies, the expectation that inthe providential unfolding of history the “day of Yahweh” would eventuallydawn when his kingship would finally be vindicated and the Kingdom of Godgloriously realized on earth.24 Bound up, moreover, with that belief in thecoming of the kingdom was a set of teachings concerning the “anointed one”(Hebrew: Messiah; Greek: Christos; Latin: Christus), the future mediatorbetween God and his people, the leader whose coming would inaugurate thatglorious event. And, as the name itself suggests, the Messiah came to beenvisaged as a royal figure, an ideal king sprung from the House of David, aroyal warrior who would recall the Israelites from their decadence, restoretheir loyalty to the covenant with God, and lead them into glorious victoryover their enemies. “Behold,” proclaimed the prophet Jeremiah (23:5–6),

the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a right-eous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall executejustice and righteousness in the land. In his day, Judah will be saved, andIsrael will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called:“The Lord is our Righteousness.”

Such Messianic teachings, then, certainly bore in their train and passed on tofuture generations a familiarity with the attributes, epithets, and images longassociated with the actual sacral monarchs of the ancient Near East. Butthose teachings evolved in complex ways during the post-exilic centuries and,by the dawn of the Christian era, they had come to take on some very differ-ent forms. As a result, the Christian appropriation of the Messianic hope,which was to shape the early Christian attitude towards kingship, proved tobe a selective and highly specific one.

Abrahamic Unease (ii): The Christian Reaction

Given the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the burden of theBabylonian exile, and the turbulence and disappointments of the subsequenthistory of the Israelite people, it is hardly surprising that the traditionalversion of the Messianic longing that remained dominant right down to thelifetime of Jesus should have been robustly this-worldly in nature. It pivoted,that is to say, on the hope against hope that from the House of David wouldspring the ideal king who, by delivering the chosen and covenanted people

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

57

once more from alien domination and by restoring the national kingdom,would vindicate the kingship of Yahweh and inaugurate the reign of right-eousness of which the prophet Jeremiah had so eloquently spoken. Indeed,the picture of the Messianic king which is conveyed by the poems known asthe “Psalms of Solomon” and dating to the period after the extension ofRoman control over Jerusalem (63 BCE) would suggest that the years ofrenewed Israelite independence under the Hasmonean kings (168–63 BCE)had actually strengthened and rendered more concrete the traditionally this-worldly nature of the Messianic hope.25 Certainly, in Christ’s own lifetimethe extremists among the Israelites were drawing from the teaching thatYahweh alone was king of his people the radical conclusion that they shouldtolerate no other king, and that it was through his priests alone thatYahweh’s wishes would be communicated. On the basis of this conclusion,these extremists (the Zealots) adopted a posture of unyielding opposition toRoman rule. It ranged from hostility towards the payment of tribute to theempire all the way to advocacy of the violent overthrow of what theyregarded as a blasphemous and alien tyranny.

But if the members of the Zealot faction were growing in importance inChrist’s own lifetime, they were not the sole bearers of the Messianic legacy.From the core notion of Yahweh’s supreme kingship a whole range of differ-ing conclusions could be drawn and had, in fact, been drawn. Side by sidewith the position adopted by the Zealots must be placed at least two others.Running in opposition to the revolutionary activism of the Zealots was thestrain of Messianic quietism which was shared by Pharisees and Sadducees –though, doubtless, in differing ways. And in opposition to Zealots, Pharisees,and Sadducees alike – all of whom shared the traditionally this-worldlyunderstanding of the Messianic kingdom – was that subsidiary complex ofMessianic ideas, glimpses of which can be had in Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah40–6), in Daniel 7:13–14, in the Jewish Apocalypse known as the Book ofEnoch (first century BCE), and in the writings of the Qumran sect(c.200 BCE–70 CE).26 These disparate works were by no means the bearersof any single, unified, or coherent system of thought. Insofar, however, asthey ignore the traditionally this-worldly version of the Messianic expecta-tion and emphasize instead the heavenly, semi-divine character of theMessiah and the universal and spiritual nature of his kingdom, they do shareat least a common tendency. And it is in the context of all three of these posi-tions that one must strive for an understanding of the ideas about kingshipand the political life embedded in the several books of the New Testament.

Any analysis of those political ideas, exegetical pitfalls notwithstanding,must necessarily begin with those which Christians, as early as the ApostolicAge (30–110 CE), themselves believed it correct to attribute to Jesus, for

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

58

those are the ideas ascribed to him in the gospels. Once we begin, we areimmediately forced to confront the fact that,

taken as a uniform, consistent, and literal record of Jesus’ teaching, thegospels are a collection of puzzles. Jesus’ teaching, life, death, resurrectionwas basic to them – but the gospels also give us the later interpretations;and the only possible way toward a solution of the inconsistencies is afrank recognition of the variety of interpretation reflected by the gospelsand their underlying sources.27

Grant issues this warning while attempting to elucidate the meaning of theexpression “the Kingdom of God.” It is one which occurs about a hundredtimes in the New Testament, which conveys a notion that clearly lies at thevery heart of Jesus’s teaching, and which constitutes the key to his attitudetowards kingship in particular and matters political in general. On this point“variety of interpretation” is certainly very evident. In many passages ofthe gospels the general emphasis is eschatological, the Kingdom of Godthus being identified as the state of righteousness destined by God’s will toarrive at the end of time and Christ’s career being regarded as the com-pelling witness to the certainty of its ultimate arrival. But there are also afew passages (e.g. Matthew. 13:41ff.; 16:18–19) that seem to suggest atleast some sort of tentative equation between the Kingdom of God and thecongregation of the faithful or visible Church. And if the former – eschato-logical – emphasis is the safer guide to an understanding of the teachingdominant in the gospels, it has in some measure to be qualified by the senseexpressed in very many gospel passages that “the time was fulfilled,” that“the decisive eschatological turning point” had “already begun in Jesus theChrist,”28 that the Kingdom was already at hand, was already in somedegree a present reality, albeit one destined to develop and grow over thelong course of history until the moment of the final consummation (thusMatthew 5:3 and 10; 11:11–12; 12:28; 13:24ff.; 18:4; 23:13; Mark 1014–15; Luke 17:21).

But if the Kingdom was at hand, was already breaking in by graduallyextending its empire over the souls of individuals, what sort of a kingdom orkingship was involved? Here the evidence of the gospels presents fewer ob-stacles to understanding. And it reveals a Christ who, while accepting the role(if not the title) of Messiah, drastically reinterpreted its meaning, setting hisface against the dominant and traditionally nationalistic and this-worldlyunderstanding of the Messianic kingdom, appropriating instead the more spir-itualized version that we have seen ascribed to Deutero-Isaiah, Daniel, theBook of Enoch, and the Qumran documents, at the same time clarifying,

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

59

deepening, and extending its meaning. Thus we should not miss the signifi-cance of the fact that the gospels represent Jesus as having lost no opportunityto underline the spiritual and universal (i.e. supranational) character of thekingdom whose advent he was proclaiming. For it was a kingdom that was totranscend all national and racial preferences and to embrace the righteousfrom among all peoples – Jewish, Samaritan, and Gentile alike (Matthew13:31–8).

The celebrated reply to Pilate: “My kingship is not of this world” mayoccur only in the Gospel according to St John (18:36) but the attitude itexpresses is reflected again and again in the other three (“synoptic”) gospels.Thus the kingdom belongs above all to “the poor in spirit,” those who “havebeen persecuted for righteousness’ sake” (Matthew 5:3 and 10), those whoare “the servant[s] of all” and have become as little children (Mark 9:35–7;Luke 9:47–8). In that kingdom leadership will properly belong to those whoserve, and there will be no lordship of the type claimed by the quasi-divinizedHellenistic kings of the day who were bold enough to title themselves“Benefactors” (Luke 22:24–30). That last text is one of several in the NewTestament that appear to voice an oblique deprecation of the contemporaryportrayal of the king as a “living law,” the state’s “link with the world order,”titled appropriately not only as “benefactor,” but also as “shepherd,” “medi-ator,” and “savior.”29

What was involved, clearly, was a conception of the Kingdom of God thatdiffered radically from that associated with the Messianic views dominant inJesus’s own lifetime. To that fact attests the evident bewilderment both of hisown followers, at least one of whom appears to have been a Zealot (Luke6:15), and of his Jewish opponents, who certainly were not, but who at theend sought to convince Pilate that he had to be something, at least, of aZealot fellow-traveller. But Jesus’s frequent disparagement of the kings andgovernments of this world and of their coercive methods had little incommon with Zealot views. It was directed, after all, against all the govern-mental structures with which he came into contact, Jewish no less thanRoman. And it was also balanced by a relative (if modest) approval of gov-ernmental authority. The latter found its most explicit endorsement inChrist’s famous statement concerning the tribute money, a statement which,if it evaded the trap being set for him by the Pharisees and Sadducees, mustcertainly have scandalized the Zealots. For if the things that were God’s wereto be rendered unto God, the tribute money, nevertheless, was identified asCaesar’s, and Christ insisted that it had to be rendered unto Caesar(Matthew 22:17–21; Mark 12:14–17; Luke 20:22–5). That position waswholly in keeping with his insistence that the Kingdom of God which he waspreaching was “not of this world,” thus implying (in modern terms) an alto-

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

60

gether novel separation of “religious” from “political” loyalties that, in thefullness of time, was to be fraught with revolutionary implications.

If Jean-Jacques Rousseau was later to lament that fact, saying that it“made the State no longer one, and brought about the internal divisionswhich have never ceased to trouble Christian peoples,” Fustel de Coulangeswas later to take a more positive view. Lauding the degree to which the sharpdistinction between political and religious loyalties liberated the individualconscience from the omnipotence of the state, he proclaimed that

Christianity completes the overthrow of the local worship; it extinguishesthe prytanea [sacred fire], and completely destroys the city-protectingdivinities. It does more: it refuses to assume the empire which these wor-ships had exercised over civil society. It professes that between the stateand itself there is nothing in common. It separates what antiquity hadconfounded. We may remark, moreover, that during three centuries thenew religion lived entirely beyond the action of the state; it knew how todispense with state protection, and even to struggle against it. These threecenturies established an abyss between the domain of government and thedomain of religion; and, as the recollection of this period could not beeffaced, it followed that this distinction became a plain and incontestabletruth, which the efforts of even a part of the clergy could not eradicate.30

Both claims have merit. But both overestimate the immediacy of the changeinvolved. And both grievously underestimate the difficulties which Christianswere to experience in perceiving and internalizing the full implications of thenew teaching, once they had ceased to be an intermittently persecutedminority and had come to occupy the favored position of adherents to a reli-gion first tolerated by the empire and then accorded the privilege (orburden) of official establishment. Those difficulties were certainly groundedin the sheer novelty of the new teaching which (at least in retrospect) can beseen to have run counter to the political commonsense of millennia. But theywere grounded also, it must be conceded, in the challenge involved inattempting to identify in the New Testament, taken as a whole, any univocalor fully integrated teaching on matters political.

It is true that if one stands back from the admitted complexities of thegospel teaching, two things do stand out in comparatively bold relief. First,that archaic notions of sacral kingship have been nudged to one side and, sofar as they implied the actual divinization of kings, bluntly rejected. Second,that if such notions survive at all in the gospel setting it is by being drawninto the magnetic field exerted by Jesus’s central teaching on the Kingdom ofGod and by being transmuted, as a result, into something radically different.

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

61

If, however, one opens up the scope of the inquiry and looks beyond theteaching ascribed to Jesus in the four gospels to the New Testament textstaken as a whole, one finds marshaled around those comparatively clearcentral commitments a varied array of positions. And those positions reflectin many ways the particular and changing circumstances in which the variousNew Testament authors found themselves at the time they were actuallywriting.

So far as kingship itself goes, nowhere, it is true, does one encounter anyreal recession from the deprecatory attitude which Luke and some of thePauline epistles evinced towards the claims for sacrality embedded in theHellenistic regal philosophy. Under the threat of persecution, indeed, thatattitude can be seen to have hardened, developing in an apocalyptic direc-tion, implying that the last days were at hand, and postulating an open andinevitable opposition between the Kingdom of God and the established (fun-damentally Satanic) powers of this world. Hints of that development appearin the fourth gospel and in St John’s First Epistle. And it moved into theforeground during the persecution by the emperors Nero and Domitian atRome when, in the name of the Kingship of God, the “Apocalypse of John”denounced as Satanic the blasphemously divinized emperors of Rome.31

Elsewhere, however, though not with specific reference to the institutionof kingship, we encounter an attitude towards political authority that, whilestill negative in comparison with archaic and classical views, is a good deal lessnegative. Writing as he was in the earlier part of Nero’s reign (54–68 CE),when stable government prevailed and the persecution of the Christian com-munity at Rome had yet to be instituted, it is understandable that Paul,himself a Roman citizen, should take Christ’s injunction that we shouldrender to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s in a very positive way. Thus inRomans 13:1–7, the text that was destined to play so formative a role in theshaping of Christian thinking about political authority through the centuries,Paul insisted that obedience to governmental authority is required, notsimply by fear but also by conscience. In the Gospel of John (19:11) Jesus isreported as having said to Pontius Pilate “You would have no power over meunless it had been given you from above.” And here Paul, expressing thesame conviction that political authority is itself of divine institution, goes onto insist that rulers, even when they punish the evildoer, are acting as theministers of God. “Pay to all what is due them,” he concludes (v.7), “Taxesto whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whomrespect is due, honor to whom honor is due.”

The emphatic nature of these exhortations (cf. I Timothy 2:2; Titus3:1–2), as also those to be found in Peter’s First Epistle (2:13–17 – “FearGod, honor the Emperor”), may reflect a need, shared by the Protestant

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

62

reformers later on, to worry about the drawing of unwarranted and politi-cized conclusions from the notion of Christian liberty. Whether or not it did,it laid the basis, when taken as the point of entry into Christian thinkingabout the state, and once Christians were accorded toleration, for a muchmore positive view of political authority than that suggested by Christ’steaching on the Kingdom of God. Certainly, when taken in conjunction withanother element in the New Testament which was in itself of historical ratherthan explicitly political import, it served to ease the way for those Christianswho, long before Constantine’s conversion in the early fourth century, firstdared to look forward to a more positive relationship between Romanempire and Christian Church. That element was the frequency with whichLuke correlates the gospel story with the history of the empire at large,noting in particular the coincidence of the birth of Christ with the reign ofthe first emperor, Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1ff., 3:1ff.; Acts 11:28, 18:2).The latter correlation, and as early as 127 CE, Melito, Bishop of Sardis, sawas nothing less than providential. So, too, at the beginning of the fourthcentury, did Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea. And, moving along that axis,while managing also to appropriate for his own purposes many an element ofthe Hellenistic philosophy of kingship, Eusebius proved able (see below, ch.3, pp. 69–76) to accomplish what the biblical notion of the divine and theNew Testament’s revolutionary separation of the religious from the politicalwould seem to have rendered altogether impossible – namely, a species ofChristian accommodation with the archaic pattern of sacral kingship.

Abrahamic Unease (iii): The Islamic “Political” Tradition

A similar, if somewhat more qualified accommodation began to emerge lateron in the seventh and eighth centuries CE. It did so in the whole vast regionstretching from the Pyrenees in the west to north-west India in the east thathad become by then the sphere of Islam, the third of the great Abrahamicreligions. That accommodation (or, more accurately, set of accommodations)was the outcome of a complex process spanning the periods of Umayyad and’Abba-sid ascendancy (c.661–850), as Islamic thinkers gradually felt their ten-tative way into an essentially monarchical mode of polity. As they did so, theywere of course guided by the fugitive hints to be found in the Qur’a-n itselfand in the hadı-th – the body of traditions, reports, or narratives conveying toposterity the sayings and actions attributed to Muhammad and his compan-ions, which the emerging cadre of ‘ulama-(scholars and teachers) assembled,largely in the mid-eighth century, and of which they eventually succeeded inconstituting themselves the authoritative interpreters. But it has to be recog-nized that those Muslim thinkers and leaders on whose shoulders, during the

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

63

centuries immediately subsequent to Muhammad’s death (632), descendedthe burden of framing a mode of polity congruent with Islamic aspirations,drew also (perhaps rather) on the vast repertoire of inherited bureaucraticpractices in the conquered territories, as well as on ideological, ceremonial,and iconographic motifs elaborated over previous millennia in the kingdomsof the ancient Near East – especially those of pre-Islamic, Persian origin.32

For Islamic political life, whether one is thinking of the mode of kingshipattaching in the early centuries to the Umayyad or ’Abba-sid caliphs or thatattaching in the modern period to the sultan/caliphs of the Ottoman Empireor to the Safavid shahs of Persia, that ancient Near Eastern inheritance was ofgreat importance. That fact must not be overlooked or swept, anachronisti-cally, to one side.

The point deserves emphasis. When, at Persepolis in 1971, the Shah ofIran (“Sha-ha-nSha-h”; “King of Kings”) unwisely made a point of lauding thevirtues of 2,500 years of Persian kingship, his future nemesis, the Ayatulla-hRu-h-Alla-h Khumainı- (d. 1989) tartly responded from exile by attacking asunIslamic the very title “King of Kings.” In so doing, he was reflecting theworried ambivalence towards kingship in general that was early embedded inthe Islamic tradition,33 and, beyond that, echoing the early Muslim juristicview that that particular title represented a profane human usurpation of aprerogative that belonged rightly to God alone. “The title King of Kings,”he said, “is the most hated of all titles in the sight of God.” But when hewent further and asserted that “to the whole notion of monarchy. . . . Islam isfundamentally opposed,” thereby dismissing the long centuries of absolutemonarchical rule in the Muslim world at large as some sort of deviation ordeclension from an original and more purely Islamic norm, he was in effect,and like so many of the ’ulama-before him, rewriting history to bring it intoconformity with the urgencies of his own contemporary religio-politicalideal.34

The fact is that the Qur’a-n has next to nothing to say about politics orgovernment as such and the hadı-th not a great deal more. Moreover, “thehistory of the first years of the Muslim polity is particularly obscure” and, byKhumainı-’s day, modern writers had long slipped into the habit of taking atface value the “formal theological disputes and debates over the nature ofpolitical authority” that medieval Muslims had eagerly projected (or retro-jected) onto what was a largely empty and concomitantly receptive screen.On this point, Aziz Al-Azmeh is particularly insistent. “Muslim forms,” hesays, “did not arise ex nihilo, nor quite simply from the writ of a Book; topropose otherwise is absurd in the light of historical reason.”35

What did arise, however, from the writ of the Qur’a-n, was somethingdestined to impress a distinctive stamp on Muslim “political” thinking, some-

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

64

thing that sets it apart from the principles fundamental to the political think-ing (if not always the political practice) of the Christian world, and somethingthat eased the way for the partial penetration into Muslim thinking aboutpolitical life of ancient Near Eastern notions of royal sacrality, despite the con-viction conveyed by such as Dhiya’ al-Din Barani (d. c.1357) that “betweenthe traditions (sunnah) of the Prophet Muhammad and his mode of living,and the customs of the Iranian emperors and their mode of living, there iscomplete contradiction.”36 What I have in mind is the umma or communitywhich Muhammad established at Medina. It was, in Western terms, a “reli-gious” community as well as a “political” organism.” “The concept of theumma has remained as the one unifying factor amidst the diversity of thepeoples of the Islamic empire,” and the union of the political and religiousthat characterized it is “symbolized in the institution of the caliphate as theessence as well as the outward form of the umma.” So that

Islam knows no distinction between religious and temporal realm,between religious and secular activities. Both realms form a unity underthe all-embracing authority of the Sharı-’a [the law].37 . . . Politics is partof religion, so to speak; . . . [it] is the scene of religion as life on this earthso long as the law of the state is the Sharı-’a. This state is the Khila-fa[caliphate] or Ima-ma [imamate or realm of the ima-m, chief or leader inprayer], and if we must operate with our Western terms, it may be definedas a spiritual and temporal unity.38

That being so, not even the purity of its monotheism or its adamant insis-tence on the transcendence and omnipotence of God sufficed to immunizeIslam altogether against infection by notions deriving from the archaicpattern of sacral kingship with which it came into such intimate and enduringcontact in the conquered territories of the Near East, most notably Iran. It istrue that the essential “biblicism” of its basic theological commitments andthe traditionalist and juristic temper of the majority Sunni community (“thepeople of the Community and Tradition,” as it was sometimes called) tendedto preclude anything more than intermittent flirtation with elements ofthe cosmic religiosity underpinning that archaic pattern of sacral kingship.The extraordinary claims repeatedly advanced in the Islamic world for theabsolutist nature of the type of kingship associated with caliph, sultan, and(under the Ottomans) sultan-caliph, the elaborately mystifying ceremonialpractices that served to distance those rulers from subject and foreigner alike,the hyperbolic jumble of titles and laudatory epithets (“King of Kings,”“shadow of God, “Caliph of God,” “human god,” “abode of clemency,”“the second Ka’ba” and so on) that served to enhance the ineffability of their

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

65

dignity – all such things notwithstanding, the ideological reach of Islamicregality was persistently contained in the Sunni tradition by the subordina-tion of caliph no less than sultan to the divinely willed prescriptions of theSharı-’a and hemmed in further by the successfully vindicated claim of the’ulama- to be the (corporately) authoritative interpreters of that overarchingand controlling legal code.

That fact duly acknowledged, it would be improper not to acknowledgealso the inroads that elements deriving ultimately from archaic notions ofregal sacrality periodically made into Muslim attitudes concerning rulers andrulership. It early became assumed, for example, that the accession to thethrone of a new caliph would bring with it rainfall and a general revival of thenatural world. Later on, the belief spread that “the person of the caliph was asupport of the order of the universe.” If he were killed the entire universewould lapse into disorder, the sun would hide its face, rain would cease, andplants would grow no more. If, in Sunni Islam, such notions were little morethan “popular conceptions” apt to be dismissed by the “Muslim theologianswho . . . [dealt] . . . with the theory of the caliphate,”39 they found morefertile soil in the Shı--ite branch of Islam, with its proclivity for esoteric inter-pretations and its fervent stress on the central role of the Ima-m or leaderupon whom the mass of faithful depended for their knowledge and under-standing of the revelation. Through his authoritative teaching alone, it wasbelieved, could the Sharı-’a be determined. He, it was said, is “the pillar of theuniverse, the ‘gate’ through whom God is approached.” By his blessing “godmaintains the Heavens, that they do not fall and destroy their inhabitants.”And in the absence of such an Ima-m representing us here below, or so saidthe Shı-’ite theorist, Jafar al-Sadiq, “verily the earth itself would collapse.”40

It is not surprising, then, that at times when and in places where Shı-’iterulers grasped the reins of imperial power essentially archaic notions of regalsacrality got something more than rhetorical free play, for example, theFa-timid caliphate centered on Egypt (907–1171) and the Safavid empirecentered on Iran (1500–1722). In the early days of the Safavid monarchyclaim was made by the Shah to a “bedazzling array of unlimited worldly andsupernatural powers” – nothing less, in effect, than supreme authority inmatters spiritual as well as temporal. Calling himself “Jesus, son of Mary,”Shah Isma’il (d. 1524) went on to identify with God the Ima-m ’Alı- ibn AbiTalib (d. 661, cousin of the Prophet and fountainhead of the Shı-’ah i-Alı- orpartisans of ’Alı-). And he went on further to claim that he himself was “of thesame essence as ’Alı- (for) a man can be a manifestation of Godhead.”41 Andit was under the Fa-timid caliphate that the degree of veneration of the rulerbegan to press against the limits set by the fundamentals of Qur’a-nic belief.With the portrayal of the Caliph al-Ha-kim bin Amr Alla-h (d. 1021) as an

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

66

incarnation of the divine, those limits were finally transgressed, leading to theestablishment among those known as the Druzes of what was a new syn-cretistic religion rather than anything properly identifiable as an Islamicsect.42

Such exotic phenomena cannot be regarded as anything approximatingmainstream Islam. But the important point for us to grasp is that if adherentsof Islam, to whom the Christian doctrine of the Trinity constituted a blas-phemous denial of the unicity of God, were nevertheless not entirelyunresponsive to notions affiliated with the archaic pattern of sacral kingship,it would be surprising, indeed, and despite the astringency of primitive Chris-tian belief, if Christian thinkers proved eventually to be any less responsive.They were in fact no less responsive, and on this matter, at least, it was theremarkable achievement of one notable tradition of patristic thinking to haveaccomplished the difficult task of filling up with “the new wine of Christian-ity” what the seventeenth-century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes,was (engagingly) to describe as the “old empty bottles of Gentilism,”43 andto have succeeded in so doing without immediately breaking them. In theLatin west that (essentially syncretistic) patristic tradition was eventually tobe challenged and subverted. But it was to endure for centuries in the Byzan-tine east and to leave a clear imprint on the imperial ideology of TsaristRussia. It is to that tradition that we must now turn.

Royal Saviors and Shepherds

67

Involving as it did a clear departure from New Testament norms and a trulybreathtaking degree of assimilation to archaic patterns of sacral monarchy,the accommodation which Christian leaders made with Roman imperialpower at the start of the fourth century constituted a revolutionary eventfraught with the most far-reaching consequences for the history of kingshipin Byzantium and Russia no less than in the western Roman empire and itsGermanic successor kingdoms in western Europe. Less than three centuriesearlier, as we have seen, the author of the Book of Revelation/Apocalypse ofJohn had not hesitated to denounce as Satanic the blasphemously divinizedemperors of Rome. And no more than a few decades earlier, worried, itseems, by the infiltration of Christian beliefs into the ranks of those holdinghigh civil or military office, and viewing the characteristic Christian refusal toparticipate in the public worship of “Rome and Augustus” as an intolerablethreat to the reconstituted unity of the empire, the emperor Diocletian(284–306) had sought to eliminate the danger by launching, in 303, whatwas probably the most widespread and thoroughgoing of persecutions. Hehad done so in vain. But the emperor Constantine’s subsequent policy ofextending first toleration and then favor to the new faith brought with it foremperor and Christians alike challenges of a different type – challenges, so faras the core commitments of normative or biblical Christianity were con-cerned, that were to prove to be no less testing.

By the end of the third century CE the very constitution of the empirehad been transformed. That transformation had occurred in the course ofmore than three centuries during which Hellenistic notions of kingship hadprogressively reshaped the common Roman understanding of the imperialoffice. That transformative process had quickened in the wake of the militaryanarchy that had turned the empire upside down during the disastrous half

3The Eusebian AccommodationChristian Rulership in Imperial Rome,

Byzantium, and Russia

68

century running from 235 to 285 CE. As a result, from being a collocationof city-states held together by the imperial princeps (or “first citizen”) butruled in collaboration with the Roman Senate, it had been transmuted intosomething akin to a military despotism. While in deference to Roman tradi-tion the imperial office was presented to the world as technically elective, ithad in fact been transformed into an absolute monarchy of quasi-orientaltype. In it, certainly, it was the will of the emperor, himself supreme judgeand court of last appeal, that was now, in effect, the dominant source of law.And it fell to the military and the imperially appointed bureaucracy – twoseparate hierarchies operating independently from one another and comingtogether only in their common head, the emperor himself – to impress thatimperial will upon a populace that had now become in character more“subject” than “citizen.”

This historic transformation was reflected in the replacement of the termprinceps, once the emperor’s proudest title, by the more accurately des-criptive dominus or “lord.” It was reflected also in the progressive alignmentof Roman imperial ideology with the Hellenistic philosophy of kingship.And it culminated in Diocletian’s eager sponsorship and intensification ofthe imperial cult itself, along with his adoption of the court ceremonial,elaborate costume, and other appurtenances of the sacral or divine kings ofMediterranean antiquity. Constantine’s grant of toleration to Christians didlittle or nothing, of itself, to cancel, roll back, or modify that transformation.Christians, it is true, had had to endure for three centuries as a proscribedand intermittently persecuted sect. One might have expected them, then, tohave reacted to their own remarkable change of state and to the claims andpretensions of their imperial master with a degree of prudent reserve compar-able, at least, to that evident in the writings of the mature St Augustine acentury later. But that early fourth-century Christians did not do. Their lackof reserve may be ascribed in part to an understandable euphoria in the wakeof the dramatic improvement in their public fortunes. But it has to be attrib-uted also to the less generally recognized fact that the development acrosstime of their own theological tradition had not left them altogether un-prepared, ideologically speaking, for their new relationship with (andunderstanding of) the imperial authority. It is with that development in mindthat I choose to employ for shorthand purposes the term “the Eusebianaccommodation.”

The Transition at Rome to Christian Monarchy

Even at their most positive, the range of political ideas to be found in theNew Testament did not equip Christians in the early fourth century very well

The Eusebian Accommodation

69

when they had to find a way to come to terms with contemporary theories ofimperial rulership and their characteristic stress on the exalted and sacrednature of the emperor. If New Testament teaching clearly excluded the possi-bility of ascribing a divine status to any ruler, however exalted, it did morethan that. Some scholars, indeed, have detected in the New Testament anexplicit deprecation of the characteristically Hellenistic claim that themonarch, being a living law, the very foundation of justice, the kingdom’slink with the logos and, therefore, with the cosmic order, should appropriatelyenjoy the titles of “shepherd,” “savior,” “mediator,” “benefactor” and so on.

Also to be found in the New Testament, however, and as we have seen, isan element which, if not in itself explicitly political, may have eased the wayfor those Christians who first dared to look forward to a more cooperativerelationship between Roman emperor and Christian Church. Certainly, ithelped Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea (d. c.340), the Church historian whocan sometimes sound like an official court ideologist for the emperor Con-stantine, to hammer out the critical accommodation between Christian beliefand pagan imperial ideology that was to have so important an impact inRome itself and so long-enduring an influence on the understanding of king-ship in the Byzantine world and, later on, it has been claimed, in Russia, too.But in reaching that accommodation Eusebius had reasons other than thehistorical correlations signaled in the Lukan texts. For the development of histhinking, another and non-historical New Testament usage was relevant – theapplication to Christ himself of such Hellenistic royal titles as “shepherd,”“savior,” “mediator.” Whether or not that was done by way of polemicagainst the ruler cult of the day, the very commonality of language that itinvolved seems to have encouraged Christian thinkers long before Eusebiusto edge towards the prevailing theories of sacral rulership, the more so in thatthey had before them the persuasive example of the Hellenizing Jewishthinker, Philo of Alexandria (c.30 BCE–c.40 CE).

Like his Christian successors, Philo confronted the urgent task of reconcil-ing the Hellenistic and Roman vision of rulership with his own monotheism.He did so, it has been said, by absorbing “all the elements of the Hellenisticdoctrine on kings, except their actual deification.”1 Correlating monarchywith monotheism, he argued that as God is in the universe so is the king inhis realm. Rulership he saw as being in the image of God and, as if to under-line the parallelism, he used of God as the supreme king the royal titles of“savior” and “benefactor.” In this something more than a mere parallelism isinvolved. Even when tyrannically exercised, rulership is a “special gift” ofGod – hence the king’s high-priestly functions and his role as a living law;hence, too, his obligation to live in community with God and to conformhimself with the logos of God (which, at least in one text, Philo identifies with

The Eusebian Accommodation

70

the divine law). Thus Moses, in whom all royal virtues were exemplified,Philo presents as king and priest, capable of governing “the people becausehe himself is governed by the Logos.”2 Nevertheless, however sublime hisposition, no king, not even the emperor himself, should be accorded divinehonors. If “he has no equal on earth” and “by the dignity of his office . . . issimilar to God who is above all,” nevertheless “by his body the king is likeany other man” and “as a mortal . . . must not be extolled.”3

The use which Philo makes of the notion of the logos is central to histhinking about rulership. To this term (possessing the twin denotation of“reason” and “word”), which the Stoics had equated with God as the divineordering reason immanent in the universe, Philo gave more than onemeaning. Sometimes he came close to Stoic views, but, more characteristi-cally, he was careful to distinguish logos from God. Instead, he spoke of it as“the image of God,” a quasi-personification (“shepherd,” “first-born son”)of the divine reason, the presence of which in God’s creation and governanceof the universe alone guarantees its order and intelligibility. Later on, ofcourse, Christian writers were to appropriate this logos doctrine and to bendit to their own uses. In so doing, they were encouraged by the fourthgospel’s identification of the logos with Jesus Christ himself (John 1:1–18),and prompted by the challenge of making the New Testament’s statementsabout the nature of Christ and his relationship with the Father coherent andintelligible to themselves no less than to the Hellenistic world at large. Fromthe time, then, of the second-century Apologists onwards, theologiansincreasingly exploited the doctrine in their ongoing attempt to shape andclarify their Trinitarian beliefs. The complexity and density of their argumen-tation is formidable, but if one prescinds from the detail one may properlyrisk the following generalization: that to the extent to which the Hellenizingmotif was dominant, the emphasis in the understanding and presentation ofJesus was not on the historical figure encountered in the New Testamentaccounts – the incarnate Christ, crucified redeemer, heir to the messianicprophecies of the Old Testament, proclaimer of the messianic kingdom,eschatological king. Instead, the emphasis was placed on the vision of Christas a cosmic figure, eternally pre-existent logos or Son of God, mediatorbetween the transcendent God and the created universe, the means by whichthe ineffable One could come into contact with the concrete Many, thesimple with the complex, the unconditioned with the conditioned. He waspresented, in effect, as the intermediate vehicle by means of which theabstract deity of the late antique philosophers could be identified with thepersonal and omnipotent God of the Old Testament who had deigned tocreate and govern the universe and to reveal himself to humankind. It was, ineffect, a precarious insertion of essentially a-temporal philosophical notions

The Eusebian Accommodation

71

of archaic provenance into the ineluctably historical modality of thinking thatstemmed from the Bible.

This particular intellectual tendency came powerfully to the fore withClement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215) and Origen (185–c.254), in whoseteaching one may also detect, side by side with an insistence that the Son orlogos is truly divine, a sense that he is somehow, nonetheless, subordinate toor less than the Father. It was this “weak” or “subordinationist” Christology,along with their view of Christ as primarily a cosmic figure, the eternally pre-existent logos, that enabled them to clothe him with royal attributes derivedless from the Bible or the tradition of eschatological Jewish messianism thanfrom the contemporary and characteristically Hellenistic picture of the idealking. In this, these theologians revealed the impress on their thinking of thewritings (and especially the political writings) of their great Alexandrian pre-decessor, Philo Judaeus. “[T]hrough the identification of the Son with theLogos of Hellenistic philosophy,” Per Beskow has said, “it becomes possible. . . to apply the ideas and terminology of [Philonic] political metaphysics toChrist.”4 At the same time, the very subordinationism of their Christologyleft them not wholly averse to following Philo’s lead in applying those sameideas and terminology to their imperial rulers, thus lessening somewhat thegap dividing Christ, the eternal logos and savior, from those more traditionalsaviors, shepherds, benefactors, and manifestations of the logos who went bythe name of emperors of Rome. Thus, despite the degree to which theomnipotence and transcendence of the biblical God might have beenexpected to exclude the assimilation of ideas associated with the Hellenisticphilosophy of sacral kingship, the development of the logos-theology by theAlexandrian church fathers served to open up a conduit through which,under the changed circumstances of the early fourth century and howevercounter-intuitively, such notions were to find their way into Christian think-ing. Even under the more chastening circumstances of their own day, bothClement and Origen had already evinced a surprisingly positive attitudetowards the Roman empire. Thus Origen subscribed to the providentialistinterpretation of the correlation between the rise of that empire and the birthof Jesus. And Clement went so far as to toy with the idea of the good ruler asbeing akin to Moses, who “was always guided by the best logos,” an animatelaw and the good shepherd of his flock.5

The existence of this strand of thinking in the Greek fathers of the churchhas to be borne in mind when one approaches the political thinking of thoselater Christians who reacted so enthusiastically to the improved conditions ofthe Constantinian era. Notable among them Eusebius of Caesarea. Howeverprominent as a churchman, he is hardly a household name in our histories ofpolitical thought. But his writings have well been described as “the point of

The Eusebian Accommodation

72

confluence of all Oriental, Hellenistic, and Ante-Nicene Christian concep-tions of kingship,” 6 and “the clearly stated . . . political philosophy of theChristian Empire.”7 To those writings, then, – notably the Oration . . . inpraise of the Emperor Constantine, the Life of the Blessed Emperor Constan-tine, and the Proof of the Gospel – we must now turn.

The political vision which informs these works is a remarkably positiveone. So much so, indeed, that it is not that far removed from the viewexpressed by Eusebius’s pagan contemporary, Themistius, who saw earthlyrulership as modeled after the celestial pattern of the kingship of Zeus, thatgod being understood, in effect, as the supreme emperor. Eusebius’s point ofdeparture, however, is a different and more historical one, nothing otherthan the “Lukan” tradition which had earlier found expression in Melito ofSardis and Origen. But Eusebius moves beyond Origen. To the Lukan tradi-tion he weds the Philonic belief in the existence of correlations betweenmonotheism and monarchy, human kingship and the archetypal kingship ofGod. It was, he says, as a result of their unhappy addiction to “the delusionof the polytheistic error” that the men of old lapsed into the chaos andanarchy that followed ineluctably from the existence of a multiplicity of com-peting kingdoms and principalities.8 Such, however, were the miseriesattendant upon that state, that the divine logos, “full of compassion for hishuman flock,” “proclaimed to men the principles and elements of true godli-ness,” the doctrine of the one God and his “sole sovereignty.” He did so,first, by the ministry of pious men, later, by that of the Hebrew prophets,and finally by his assumption of “a mortal body.” “The causes of multipliedgovernments being thus removed,” the Roman empire “effected an easyconquest of those which yet remained” and “no one could deny that the syn-chronizing of this with the beginning of the teaching about our Saviour is ofGod’s arrangement.”9 Thus

At the same time one universal power, the Roman empire, arose and flour-ished, while the enduring and implacable hatred of nation against nationwas now removed; and as the knowledge of one God, and one way of reli-gion and salvation, even the doctrine of Christ, was made known to allmankind; so at the self-same period the entire domination of the Romanempire being vested in a single sovereign, profound peace reignedthroughout the world.10

And this “profound peace,” this “deepest peace,” the Pax Augusti which haslasted “from our Saviour’s birth until now,” Eusebius considered to be “theproof irrefutable that the prophet refers to the time of our Saviour’s comingamong men.”11

The Eusebian Accommodation

73

If such a significance could attach to the rise of the empire under CaesarAugustus, it is hardly surprising that Constantine’s inauguration of a Christ-ian empire – so much closer, after all, to the archetype of divine monarchy –could be regarded not merely as a fulfillment of the Augustan mission butalmost as an extension (or completion) of the work of Christ. Eusebius, cer-tainly, lost no opportunity to stress the sacred nature of Constantine’simperial position or his personal proximity to God. Thus he is portrayed as“like some general bishop constituted by God,” a quasi-priestly figure deeplyinvolved in the government of the Church.12 To him, we are told, have fre-quently been vouchsafed revelatory visions and “the frequent light” of “thedivine presence.” So much so, indeed, that it would be presumptuous toinstruct him in matters pertaining to the sacred mysteries.13

Such assertions are the more surprising in view of the fact that Constantinewas still at the time a mere, unbaptized catechumaen. That notwithstanding,his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian bridge is seen to parallel the destruc-tion of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea, and on several occasions Eusebiusexplicitly compares him with Moses, the figure in whom Philo and Clement ofAlexandria had seen all royal virtues exemplified.14 More startlingly, Eusebiusseems to be hinting from time to time that with the advent of Constantine theworld was witnessing the dawn of the messianic age which, as had beenpromised, was to follow upon the reign of Antichrist. The great palacebanquet at which Constantine “feasted” with those ministers of God whomhe had reconciled would seem to be suggestive of the messianic banquet.15 Inone passage of the Oration, moreover, attributing to Constantine the victorywhich in a parallel passage elsewhere he had attributed to Christ, the logos,Eusebius presents the emperor as a quasi-messianic figure, “the Servant ofGod” who has finally vanquished the “numberless” forces of evil.16

It seems safe to assume that it was his indebtedness to Philo and his sympa-thy with the form of logos-theology espoused by the Alexandrian churchfathers that disposed Eusebius to draw comparisons of this sort which, interms even of the most positive strand of New Testament political thinking,are really quite startling. His familiarity with Philo’s Judaized version ofHellenistic sacral kingship is well attested. So, too, is the “weak” or “subordi-nationist” nature of his Christology. Both, certainly, are on display in theOration. There God the Father is presented as the supreme royal figure, “thesole and Supreme Sovereign and Lord.” “Unbegotten, above and beyond allcreation, ineffable, inaccessible, unapproachable, dwelling . . . in the lightwhich none can enter,” he is the God of the late antique philosophers and, assuch, if he is also to be the God of the Old Testament, creator of all thingsvisible and invisible, he needs “an intermediate Power between himself andthem” – that is, between himself and those merely created beings that are so

The Eusebian Accommodation

74

far removed from his supreme authority. That intermediary is Eusebius’ssecond royal figure, “the only begotten Son of God,” Christ, the divine Word(logos) whom the Father appointed “Lord and Governor of this Universe”and who, “receiving into his hands the reins . . . of the world, turns anddirects it as a skillful charioteer according to his own will and pleasure.”17

Despite these rather uneasy formulations Eusebius does not deny thedivinity of the logos; nor does he fail to affirm that, without changing his “truegodliness” the logos assumed “a mortal body,” was crucified, and rose fromthe dead. But in the Oration he speaks little of the historical Christ, and it issignificant that he explains the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection asnecessary, above all, if the logos was to be able, by assuming “this mortal bodyas a medium of intercourse” or “communication” with humankind, to over-come their ignorance and to fulfill his mission as revealer of the One God,transcendent and omnipotent.18

His Christ, then, faithful in this to the Alexandrian tradition, is above allthe eternally pre-existent logos, creator, governor, “preserver of all things,”sole revealer of the Father, but distinct from and subordinate to him. Thus,although the Christ-logos is Lord of All, “mighty power,” “the Author ofEmpire itself, and of all dominion and power,” Eusebius is able to associatevery closely with him the earthly Roman emperor, no less in his task ofimparting to humankind “the knowledge of his Father’s kingdom” thanin that of governing and directing “the visible and invisible Creation.”19

For the Christ-logos expresses “by the similitude of an earthly kingdom thatheavenly one to which he earnestly invites all mankind, and presents it tothem as a worthy object of their hope.” And in that hope the divinely favoredConstantine, “whose character is formed after the archetypal idea of theSupreme Sovereign,” and “who has formed his soul to royal virtues, accord-ing to the standard of that celestial Kingdom,” partakes “even in this presentlife,” thus standing as Eusebius’s third royal figure in a uniquely intimaterelationship with the Christ-logos, “from whom . . . receiving, as it were, atranscript of the Divine sovereignty, [he] directs, in imitation of God himself,the administration of this world’s affairs.”20

All such sentiments, of course, like Eusebius’s further application to Con-stantine of the ancient oriental sun symbolism, are redolent of the Hellenisticvision of sacral kingship. Nowhere is Eusebius’s eagerness to share that visionmore notable than in the second chapter of the Oration. For in that section,without ascribing divinity to the emperor or stating him to be an incarnationof the logos and, as such, a living law, he contrives nonetheless to correlate hispowers and functions very closely with those of “his friend,” the Christ-logos,and to draw an astonishing series of parallels between their respective author-ities, salvational as well as governmental. For if, following the scriptures,

The Eusebian Accommodation

75

Eusebius accords to the Christ-logos such Hellenistic royal titles as savior andgood shepherd (titles which, he tells us elsewhere, the soldiers had accordedto the emperor), he himself does not hold back here from attributing similarqualities and functions to Constantine. He presents the emperor as an imita-tor of the “Divine philanthropy,” “a faithful shepherd,” and, indeed, as a sortof imperial savior, a priestly and Christlike figure who “dedicates to the uni-versal Sovereign a pleasant and acceptable sacrifice, even his own imperialsoul . . . as a noble offering, a first fruit of that world, the government ofwhich is intrusted to his charge.”21

It has well been said that

Christians in the Ante-Nicene period [pre-325 CE] had for the most partrecognized the Roman State, even when it persecuted them, as an order ofcreation, but emphatically not [as it was for the pagans of that era] as anorder of redemption. . . . But now in the fourth century with the emperora Christian, the state would seem to have significance as an ally of theChurch or indeed as itself a secondary instrument of salvation by fostering. . . Christianity.22

In light of Eusebius’s thoroughgoing resacralization of the imperial office onquasi-Christian terms that judgment would seem, if anything, to represent anunderstatement. For he is certainly moved to interpret “the victory of Con-stantine in terms of the history of salvation.” It is not to the earthly, incarnateJesus Christ whose authority lives on in the Church that he portrays Con-stantine as being obedient, but rather to the eternal logos.23 It would be idle,as a result, to seek in Eusebius’s thinking for any clear distinction betweenChurch and Christian empire. To the contrary, as the subjects of the empirebecame Christian, Eusebius saw those two social structures move towardsunity, the Christian society thus produced by its very existence standing inclose relation to the Kingdom of God. Thus when, at the imperial banquet,Constantine assembled around him all the Christian bishops “whom he hadreconciled, and thus offered as it were through them a suitable sacrifice toGod,” Eusebius comments that “one might have thought that a picture ofChrist’s kingdom was thus shadowed forth.”24

The Byzantine Basileus

To the extent to which the Eusebian political theology was dependent upona subordinationist Christology, one might expect it to have been undercut in325 by the Council of Nicaea’s insistence that Jesus Christ was the Son ofGod, consubstantial with (of the same essence as) the divine Father. In some

The Eusebian Accommodation

76

measure at least, that did indeed happen, but not, it would seem, before themore chastening political conditions of the mid-fourth century had begunindependently to make clear how vain had been the Eusebian imaginings thatthe looming silhouette of the millennial kingdom of the prophets was to bediscerned in the newly Christianized empire of Rome. For it was under theimpact of the emperor Constantius II’s espousal of the Arian heresy that suchsupporters of the Nicene orthodoxy as St Athanasius (d. 373) in the east andSt Hilary (d. c.367) in the west began openly to criticize imperial inter-ference in ecclesiastical affairs.

We must not suppose, however, that the willingness to adopt a less uncrit-ical attitude towards the claims and attitudes of the emperors in mattersreligious necessarily involved any wholesale abandonment of the Eusebianpolitical vision. In the cases of St Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) in the west orSt John Chrysostom (d. 407) in the east, it may reflect no more than ananxious attempt to discriminate between the ill-defined type of priesthoodascribed to the emperor and the more exclusive priesthood in matters sacra-mental possessed by the ordained clergy.25 But even on that score and even inthe west more than half a century later, Pope Leo I (440–61), who standsout for having advanced quite striking claims on behalf of the papal primacy,could still attribute to the emperor a semblance of sacerdotal power.26 Notuntil the end of the fifth century, indeed, in the celebrated statements of oneof his successors, Gelasius I (492–6), do we encounter an unambiguousrejection of that imperial sacerdotal power. For that much about the con-tested views of Gelasius is certainly clear. Little else is, however, and, giventhe conflicting interpretations that western commentators were to give to hisviews over the course of the next millennium, his statements call for some-what more extended commentary here.

Before the coming of Christ, Gelasius acknowledged, there had been menwho, like Melchizedek, had been both kings and priests. But since that time“the emperor no longer assumed the title of priest, nor did the priest claimthe royal dignity.” Christ “distinguished between the offices of both powersaccording to their own proper activities and separate dignities,” so thatneither would be “exalted by the subservience of the other, and each profes-sion would be especially fitted for its appropriate functions.”27 Thatargument he sought to bolster with the historically misleading argument thatit was only the pagan emperors who had claimed the title of “supremepontiff.” It has to be realized that he was writing under the crisis conditionsspawned by the Emperor Zeno’s unilateral attempt to impose his own im-perial doctrinal solution to the Christological disputes of the day. It has to berealized, too, that Gelasius was writing at a time when the emperor no longerwielded anything more than a theoretical authority at Rome itself and when

The Eusebian Accommodation

77

the papacy had already begun the process of elaborating in legal terms itsown claims to a primacy of jurisdiction in the Church.

That being so, it is perfectly comprehensible that Gelasius, by dismissingthe established notion of the emperor’s priesthood and by affirming a dual-ism of powers that was certainly more in keeping with the New Testamentvision of things, should seek to eliminate the grounds for imperial interven-tion in ecclesiastical affairs. What remains a disputed question, however, ishow much further than that he intended to go – whether or not, in effect, heintended to claim for the priesthood in general and for the papacy in particu-lar a superiority even in matters temporal. Many a medieval writer in the westcertainly believed that to be the case. Similarly, some modern scholars con-tinue to affirm, and on the basis of the most subtle analyses, that that is theconclusion one should properly draw from Gelasius’s oft-quoted statementin a letter of 494 to the emperor Anastasius:

Two there are, august emperor, by which this world [hoc mundum] ischiefly ruled, the sacred authority [auctoritas] of the priesthood and theroyal power [potestas]. Of these the responsibility of the priests is the moreweighty insofar as they will answer for the kings of men themselves at thedivine judgment.28

Much of the controversy over this particular text has turned upon the precisemeanings to be accorded to the technical legal terms auctoritas and potestas,but there seems to be little ground for concluding that Gelasius wished toaccord an inherently superior authority to the priesthood and a merely dele-gated power to the emperor even in matters temporal. Little ground, that is,unless one is committed to the prior assumption that when he ascribed aweightier responsibility to the priests in that they will have to answer forkings at the divine judgment, he had in mind not the emperor as a simplemember of the faithful but the imperial power itself. The letter as a whole,which is, moreover, extremely deferential in tone, does not lend itself veryreadily to such an interpretation – the less so, indeed, when read in its histor-ical context and in tandem with Gelasius’s other principal statement on thetwo powers discussed earlier. For that context, it should not be forgotten,was one of crisis in which it was the pope who was on the defensive and theemperor who had broken with tradition by attempting, on his own soleauthority, to impose a doctrinal position on the Church.29

Apart, then, from Gelasius’s denial of any sacerdotal office to the emperor,his views constitute no marked break with Eusebius’s half-Christianizedversion of the Hellenistic philosophy of kingship. In any case, however muchpapal theorists were to make of his views later on in the west, Gelasius’s

The Eusebian Accommodation

78

immediate successors at Rome appear in remarkable degree to have beenunmoved by them, preferring to revert instead to fully traditional attitudes.30

Still less did his limited break with the tradition evoke any echoes in the east.There, the attribution to the emperor of some sort of priestly power was topersist for centuries, defying efforts to disentangle it in clear and definitivefashion from the specific range of powers possessed by the ordained priest-hood. To the emperors Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian a priestlycharacter was routinely ascribed and, as late as the ninth century, the icono-clast emperor Leo III was at pains to remind the pope that he himself,though emperor, was also a priest.

Over the course of time, however, a somewhat greater measure of claritywas achieved on the question of what such claims actually involved. In thethirteenth century, for example, Demetrios Chromatianos, describing theemperor’s ecclesiastical status, called him “the general epistemonarches of thechurches.” The term was a technical one suggesting that, so far as theChurch was concerned, he was “the wise defender of the faith and regulatorof order in the church.” “With the single exception of the sacramentaloffice,” Demetrios said, “all the other privileges of a bishop are clearly repre-sented by the emperor, and he performs them legally and canonically.”31

If one were to attempt to understand what he had in mind by callingon the battery of canonistic distinctions which the church lawyers in theLatin west finally hammered out in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, onemight suggest the following. What was being denied to the emperor was the“power of order,” the power of conferring sacraments which bishops andpriests possessed by virtue of having themselves received the sacrament ofholy orders. What, on the other hand, was being accorded to the emperor inhis dealings with the Church was the “power of jurisdiction in the externalforum” or public sphere, a coercive power pertaining to a public authority,exercised even over the unwilling, and directed to the common good of thefaithful – in effect, a truly governmental power over the Church.32 It shouldbe conceded, however, that in the Latin Middle Ages that species of jurisdic-tional power was viewed as embracing the magisterial power or authorityover the defining of true doctrine. And while some Byzantine emperors didindeed make the weight of their imperial authority felt in matters doctrinal,they tended to run into an unyielding wall of clerical (and especially monas-tic) opposition if they attempted to do so unilaterally, by so doing shatteringthe symphonia or harmony with the Patriarch of Constantinople, the “ami-cable dyarchy” that represented in such matters the enduring Byzantineideal.33

That qualification duly noted, there seems little reason to fault the charac-teristic judgment of Norman H. Baynes to the effect that in Eusebius’s

The Eusebian Accommodation

79

Oration we find clearly stated, and for the first time, “the political philosophyof the Christian Empire, that philosophy of the state which was consistently[to be] maintained throughout the millennium of Byzantine absolutism,” itsbasic tenet being “the conception of the imperial government as a terrestrialcopy of the rule of God in Heaven.”34 Hence the persistent Byzantine con-sciousness of the proximity in which the Christian empire stood to theKingdom of God. Hence, too, the uninterrupted and intimate mingling ofthe political and ecclesiastical orders in the political life, no less than in thelegal and political thinking of the Byzantine world. In the Greek “political”vocabulary “Christianity” and “Christendom” had no cognates. The Churchwas itself viewed as essentially coterminous with the empire, and Justinian’slegislation, accordingly (and quintessentially), extended into almost everynook and cranny of ecclesiastical life.

To acquiesce in such judgments, I should add, is not necessarily tosuppose either that Byzantine public life remained undisturbed by the exis-tence of tensions between the clerical authorities and the imperial govern-ment or that Byzantine attitudes on matters political were altogethermonolithic and resolutely unchanging. Even a nodding acquaintance withthe complexities of Byzantine history would serve to disabuse one of anynotion that the emperor possessed a degree of control over the apparatus ofecclesiastical life such that the assertion by clerical dignitaries of the ultimatespiritual independence of the Church was totally inconceivable. Such, forexample, was the intensity of the monastic opposition to the religious policiesof the eighth- and ninth-century iconoclastic emperors that they were finallyforced to abandon their prohibition of image-worship.

Despite such shifts and tensions, and despite an identifiable strengtheningacross time of the spirit of clerical independence, Byzantine thinking aboutkingship did indeed betray a remarkable degree of stability. It never aban-doned the ideal of a fundamental symphonia or harmony between theimperial authority and the clerical priesthood to which the emperor Justinianhad given influential expression – even if he had not always honored it in theactual exercise of his power. As he put it in one of his decrees, it was his con-viction that “the priesthood and the imperium do not differ so very much,nor are sacred things so very different from those of public and commoninterest.” And it was equally his conviction that “our chief concern . . .regards the true dogmas about God and the saintliness of the priests.” In sospeaking he also made clear that he regarded the imperial authority no lessthan the priesthood as a gift of God to man, and that he believed it to be afundamental part of his imperial mission to lead his people to God, toconcern himself with their spiritual welfare and, acting in harmony with thepriesthood, to take whatever steps were necessary to preserve the true faith.35

The Eusebian Accommodation

80

Though Justinian nowhere systematically expounded it, the old Hellenis-tic philosophy of kingship so powerfully influenced his thinking that in oneof his laws, abandoning even the muted qualifications of a Eusebius, he wentso far as to embrace the ancient notion that God had sent the emperor toman to serve as an “incarnate law.” That being so, it is understandable thatremnants of the old vocabulary of imperial divinity, lingering on at Byzan-tium, were to generate echoes in the legal code itself, or that somethingapproximating a Christianized version of the old imperial ruler cult was toremain embedded in the elaborate ceremonial of the imperial court and insuch practices as that of venerating the imperial image in the churches of theempire. It early became common to portray the emperor as a “new David” ora “new Solomon” and to compare him, not only with Moses but also (Gela-sius to the contrary) with Melchizedek, the archetypal priest-king of the OldTestament. In the great mosaics of San Vitale, Ravenna, Melchizedek isdepicted wearing the robes of the basileus and elsewhere David is depicted insimilar guise. Nor is it surprising that Byzantine iconography should reflect atleast the chastened post-Nicene version of the Eusebian political vision, theimperial majesty thus being brought into close relation with the royal attrib-utes of Christ.36

With this last point we return to beginnings. It was their Christologicalthinking, after all, that had eased the way for theologians like Origen,Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius to domesticate Philo’s version of theHellenistic philosophy of kingship within the alien and hostile landscape ofChristian belief. They had succeeded despite the disruptive impact of theJudaic conception of God and of Christ’s reinterpretation of the messianichope. By so doing, of course, they had succeeded in making possible whatChristian political attitudes of the Apostolic era might well seem to have ren-dered impossible – namely, the construction of a Christianized version of thearchaic sacral pattern. That version was to preclude the emergence in theByzantine east of any firm distinction between what we in the west havebecome accustomed to calling “church” and “state,” and even came close attimes to affirming that the realization of the Kingdom of God was to belinked with the expansion of the Christian empire. Across the centuries, cer-tainly, it consistently presupposed that that empire stood in close relationshipwith the heavenly kingdom.

Thus the emperor Constantine (Eusebius tells us) wrote to the king ofPersia in defence of the Persian Christians, by so doing revealing that “hefancied himself the Caesar of every Christian in the world, claiming a powerthat could only rest on an identification of a universal Church and a universalempire” as well as on the presupposition that “since there was only one Godin Heaven, only one emperor should represent him on earth.”37 Another

The Eusebian Accommodation

81

letter, written over a thousand years later and at a time when a shrunkenempire possessed no more than tattered remnants of its former power andglory, witnesses powerfully to the remarkable tenacity with which such ideaspersisted at Byzantium. Written around 1395 by Antonius IV, Patriarch ofConstantinople, to Vasili I, Grand Prince of Moscow, and responding to thelatter’s assertion that he recognized the authority of the Byzantine patriarchbut not that of the [Byzantine] emperor, it bluntly insisted that

The holy emperor has a great place in the Church: he is not as other rulersand the governors of other regions are; and this is because the emperors,from the beginning, established and confirmed true religion (eusebeia) inall the inhabited world (oikoumene-) . . . My son, [because of that] you arewrong in saying “we have a church, but not an emperor.” It is not possiblefor Christians to have a church (ekkle-sia) and not to have an empire(basileia). Church and empire have a great unity (heno-sis) and community;nor is it possible for them to be separated from one another. . . . Our great

The Eusebian Accommodation

82

Figure 5 Byzantium, Constantinople. Hagia Sophia, mosaic in the south vestibule. TheVirgin Mary with her child, between the Emperors Constantine and Justinian, end oftenth century. (akg-images/Erich Lessing)

and holy sovereign (autokrato-r), by the grace of God, is most orthodoxand faithful: he is the champion, defender, and vindicator of the Church:and it is not possible that there should be a primate who does not makemention of his name.38

As we shall see, the gulf between Antonius’s outlook and the posture charac-teristically adopted by his fellow ecclesiastics in the Latin west was to loomlarge. But however alien his outlook would have been to fourteenth-centurycontemporaries in the west, it was to prove eventually to be very much athome in the Russian east. Scholars, accordingly, have often been tempted toview the distinctive features specific to Russian kingship and even to themodern Russian state as stemming from the nature, depth, and endurance ofRussia’s Byzantine inheritance. Such claims, of course, have not gone uncon-tested. They warrant then, and by way of conclusion, a brief attempt atappraisal.

The Russian Tsar

By the nineteenth century the mantra characteristically on the lips of thosewho gave expression to the official Tsarist ideology was “Orthodoxy, Autoc-racy, Nationality.” Already, a century earlier, Peter the Great (1682–1725)had abolished the Moscow patriarchate and reduced the Church, legallyspeaking and in matters administrative and organizational, to a departmentof state. In his Articles of War, he had also made it clear that his will nomore suffered limits in temporal affairs than it did in ecclesiastical. “HisMajesty is a sovereign monarch,” the twentieth article bluntly asserted,“whom no one on earth may call into account for his actions, but who haspower to govern his realm and lands, as a Christian sovereign according tohis own will and judgment.”39 And that very formulation attests to thedegree to which, since the time of Ivan IV (“the Terrible” – 1533–84), thetitle of autokrator had come to be understood as connoting not simply“independence from external or foreign powers” but also “independencefrom internal, domestic restraints, authority unlimited by laws, institutions,or customs.”40

Contemplating so aggressive and unqualified an understanding of thereach of royal power, which went well beyond the claims made for theabsolute monarchies of western Europe, the late Arnold Toynbee was movedin 1948 to assert that “the Soviet Union today, like the Grand Duchy ofMoscow in the fourteenth century, reproduces the salient features of themedieval East Roman Empire.” “In this Byzantine totalitarian state,” headded, “the church may be Christian or Marxist so long as it submits to

The Eusebian Accommodation

83

being the secular government’s tool.”41 Toynbee’s formulation is a charac-teristically extreme one. In response, scholars have been quick to questionthe validity of his characterization of the Byzantine tradition. And they havealso insisted to the contrary that “the seeds of [modern] Russian totalitarian-ism . . . far from being inspired by Byzantine models” instead reflectedwestern Lutheran practices and “were sown by Peter the Great” in the eight-eenth century.42

Such demurrals duly noted, and wherever one comes out on the largerissue which Toynbee raised, it is indeed on the inheritance from earlier cen-turies that one should properly focus if one’s concern, as is ours, is with thesacral dimension so persistently attaching to the office and person of theRussian tsar. But there would be something skewed about that focus if it didnot also embrace, along with the Byzantine inheritance, the legacy derivingfrom 240 years of Mongol or Tatar rule or overlordship (c.1240–1480).

The nature and extent of that legacy is not easy to assess. In general, it isimportant to recall that a sacral element attached to the office and person ofthe Mongol khan (or king). Sacred or divine ancestry, certainly, was ascribedto the great Chingis Khan, who, in the Chinese fashion, bore the title ofT’ien-tze or “Son of Heaven.” He was viewed, and viewed himself, as pos-sessed of the “mandate of heaven,” and as divinely charged with the noblemission of bringing peace to mankind by absorbing the nations into an over-arching unity. The very title of Tsar, regularly applied to Russian rulers fromthe time of Ivan IV’s coronation in 1547 onwards, had earlier been appliednot only to Byzantine emperors but also to the Mongol khans descendedfrom Chingis Khan himself. Hence the sense that their rule, too, was divinelyordained. Hence, too, the gradual process whereby in Russia “the image ofthe khan overlapped that of the [Byzantine] basileus” and became “vaguelyfused” with it. Hence again, the related process whereby the “golden cap” orcap or crown of Monomachus – of Central Asian rather than Byzantineorigin and originally “an expression of the sovereign position of the Tatarkhan” – became the primary piece of royal regalia of the Russian state. “ForRussians of the sixteenth century,” then, “the title of ‘tsar’ was firmly con-nected with the image of the khan, more so than with that of the basileus.”And that image was perhaps “preserved in the idea of the Russian ruler as theconqueror of Russia and of its people, responsible to no one.”43

Thus Michael Cherniavsky. But that claim duly acknowledged, it remainsthe case that, so far as the specifically sacral characteristics of the Russian tsarsare concerned, the Byzantine legacy was nonetheless the dominant one.During the reign of Ivan III, in the wake of the Turkish conquest in 1453 ofConstantinople, the concomitant demise of the Byzantine empire, and thecontemporaneous decline of the Mongol overlordship in Russia itself, the

The Eusebian Accommodation

84

Russian orthodox clergy set out to obliterate the memory of the khan-tsar, toforeground instead the notion of the tsar-basileus as rightful successor to theerstwhile Byzantine emperors, and to position him as obvious claimant to thesupreme leadership of the Orthodox world. In the early sixteenth century thenotion began to gain currency that just as Constantinople had been the newor second Rome, so now was Moscow “the Third Rome” and rightful bearerof the Roman-Byzantine legacy. Around the same time, moreover, threeother links with Byzantium came to be stressed. Having married SophiaPalaeologa, niece of Constantine XI (d. 1453), the last of the Byzantineemperors, Ivan III could well claim to stand in the Roman-Byzantine succes-sion. So, too, could his royal successors. Those successors claimed also thatwhen, centuries earlier, Vladimir I, prince of Kiev, had embraced OrthodoxChristianity (c.988), the Byzantine emperor had given him, not only hissister Anna in marriage, but also an imperial crown. And they claimed toothat his son Vladimir II – son also, after all, of a Byzantine princess – hadreceived some further pieces of imperial regalia.

While the two latter testimonies to the antiquity and intimacy of theByzantine connection appear, in fact, to have been no more than legends,they came nevertheless to be incorporated in the Russian coronation cere-mony and were to serve across the years to reinforce the widespread Russianbelief in the existence of a basic continuity between the second Rome and thethird. So far, moreover, as the sacred nature of the tsar’s office was con-cerned, that element of continuity was not entirely dependent on legend orclerical propaganda. It possessed, in fact, some real historical foundations laidback in the early days of the Christian principality of Kiev. Though parts of itmay well have been of somewhat later date, the church statute attributed toVladimir I and issued allegedly in 996 “established an extensive precedent forthe acceptance of Greek canon law.” It was to provide a model in later timesfor similar Russian statutes. And it was to be bolstered by the appearance inRussia of collections of canon law that had been translated into Slavonic fromthe original Greek.44 The circulation of such collections had a broader signif-icance than the term “canon law” might readily suggest. For they mediatedto Russians an acquaintance not only with Byzantine imperial laws concern-ing ecclesiastical affairs, but also with elements of the Eusebian vision ofkingship, with the interdependent relationship between emperor and priest-hood, and with the ancient ideal of a symphonia or harmony between whatwe are accustomed to calling church and state.

Certainly, that Byzantine ideal was to become the Russian ideal, too.“Mutual aid linked . . . church and state . . . together irrevocably,” both ininstitutional terms and in the popular mind.45 If the balance of power waseventually to be tipped in Russia far more towards the power of the monarch

The Eusebian Accommodation

85

than it had ever been in Byzantium, the enduring ideal remained in itsessence the same. And enduring it certainly was. Among those who, in themid-nineteenth century, stood out as defenders of the established official ide-ology against the corrosive forces of Westernizing rationalism and liberalism,“all approved aspects of the social order were said to be interrelated.” Thusfor the poet Vasili Zhukovsky the tsarist autocracy was “the final link betweenthe power of man and the power of God.” For the novelist Nikolai Gogol –and in this he was reaching down into the deepest layers of the ideologicalpast – the tsar remained “the image of God on earth.”46 However differentthe trajectory followed by kingship in the modern west, in the Russian east, itseems, what we have called the Eusebian accommodation with the Hellenis-tic vision of kingship was vital enough in the nineteenth century to be ablestill to start potent echoes. But the forces of opposition were gathering, reli-gious and intellectual no less than political, and that durable vision wasdestined in the twentieth century to meet its term.

The Eusebian Accommodation

86

87

By the time of the emperor Constantine’s death in 337 Christianity was wellon its way to being transformed from a private sect into a civic religion, onethat recognized in the person of the emperor its supreme head on earth, andone, indeed, that was increasingly willing to place itself at the service of theimperial ruler cult. In the years that followed the destinies of Church andempire were to become increasingly intertwined, and especially so after 392when the emperor Theodosius the Great finally proscribed every form ofpagan worship throughout the empire.

Theodosius, however, turned out to be the last emperor to be in a posi-tion to make quite so ecumenical a gesture, in that he was to be the lastemperor whose rule extended to every province of the old empire. After hisdeath the practice, instituted by Diocletian, of dividing up the onerousresponsibilities of government between or among two or more imperial col-leagues ceased to be an intermittent one. Theodosius’s two sons divided theRoman empire into two parts, eastern and western, which were largely inde-pendent of one another and whose histories increasingly diverged. If imperialunity survived, it did so increasingly as little more than a beckoning fiction.The eastern Roman empire was to endure for long centuries down to 1453,and, with it, as we have seen, the Eusebian imperial ideology. By the end ofthe fifth century, however, though its legacy was everywhere apparent, thepolitical structure that we know as the Roman empire of the west had ceasedto exist, and its provinces had passed under the control of the several groupsof Germanic invaders who had succeeded in breaching its frontiers or gradu-ally infiltrating its territories – Vandals in North Africa, Ostrogoths in Italy,Visigoths and Suevi in Spain, Angles, Jutes, and Saxons in Britain, Burgun-dians, Alemanni, and Saxons in Gaul and its eastern environs.

The attempt which the eastern emperor Justinian I (527–65) began in

4The Carolingian Accommodation

Christian Rulership in the Germanic Successor Kingdoms of Western Europe

533 to reconquer the western territories which had once belonged to theRomans but had been lost, he said, through “carelessness,” succeeded in thecourse of more than twenty years of bitter fighting in destroying Vandal rulein North Africa and Ostrogothic rule in Italy. It also succeeded in establish-ing Byzantine control over some territory in south-east Spain. But itslong-term results were less impressive. Devastated by the long war of recon-quest and groaning anew under a heightened burden of imperial taxation,Italy easily fell prey shortly after Justinian’s death to the onslaught of theLombards, a Germanic people who succeeded in conquering the north ofItaly and a good deal of territory further south. Byzantine forces, it is true,retained control of the southernmost part of the peninsula and of a few scat-tered holdings further to the north – notably Naples, Genoa, Ravenna,Rome, and a strip of land connecting the two last. But despite the presenceof the Byzantine exarch in Ravenna, Byzantine rule tended in the course oftime to become a reality in the south alone, and Rome, exposed though itwas to the constant threat of Lombard attack, was fated to be left increas-ingly to its own devices. All of these developments, along with the rise ofIslam in the seventh century, the concomitant extinction of the Visigothickingdom, and the passing of Spain into the orbit of the Muslim world, setthe context in which the Franks, who (unlike the Goths) had embraced theNicene Catholic rather than the heterodox Arian form of Christianity, wereable to reach out to grasp the future leadership of the west.

Grasp that leadership eventually they did, constructing a universal empirethat not only embraced the greater part of Christian Europe but alsoexpanded the boundaries of Christendom eastward into central Europe andinto territory that had never been subject to Rome. Under the great kingCharlemagne (768–814), indeed, Frankish rule came to extend over thewhole of Germanic Europe, except for Scandinavia and England, as well asover the greater part of what had been the western Roman empire, with theexception, again, of England, the southern half of the Italian peninsula, andabout two thirds of Spain; it also included some sort of suzerainty over thewestern reaches of the Slavic world in central Europe. Though some confu-sion surrounds both the event itself and the precise (and divergent)intentions of the participants, there was a certain appropriateness, then, inthe decision of the pope to crown Charlemagne at Rome in 800 as emperorof the Romans, as well as the subsequent (if reluctant) decision of the Byzan-tine emperor to concede that title to him, thus admitting the reconstitutionat least in legal terms of the Roman empire of the west.

One must certainly pay due attention to the importance and governmen-tal creativity of Anglo-Saxon England. But so far as the ideology of kingshipis concerned, and the elaborate rituals and performances that gave it endur-

The Carolingian Accommodation

88

ing expression, it was the Frankish realm, during the years running from themid-eighth to the late ninth centuries, that came to function as the principalliturgical atelier. It was in that realm, and largely during that era, that theGermanic peoples of the west succeeded finally as Latin Christians in comingto their own distinctive terms with the archaic patterns of sacral kingshiponce so deeply entrenched among their pagan forebears and capable still, itseems, of generating harmonics in the collective consciousness. They did so(Anglo-Saxons no less than Franks, or Saxons later on), by a process that, byway of parallelism with the Eusebian accommodation, I have again for short-hand purposes termed “the Carolingian accommodation.”

“Political Augustinianism” and the Half-life ofSacral Monarchy in the Early Medieval West

The vicissitudes and turbulence of Byzantine and Russian history notwith-standing, the Eusebian apprehension of the Christian Empire as amanifestation of the dawning Kingdom of God, and its insertion, accord-ingly, into the unfolding narrative of salvation history, was destined to cast along shadow down across the centuries. It did so, however, in the teeth ofthe New Testament’s comparatively negative appraisal of the role and reachof political authority, and that shadow was not destined to fall westwards.Already in the lifetime of Eusebius the Empire’s center of gravity had begunto shift to the east, and the subsequent “provincialization” of the territoriesbelonging to the western Empire was accompanied there by the progressivedecline in the fortunes of the Greek language. The passage of those territo-ries into barbarian hands, and the subsequent expansion of the Islamicempire at the expense of Byzantine and barbarian alike, accelerated the pro-gressive weakening of the surviving links between east and west. As a result,for its contact with the thinking of Christian antiquity concerning politicalauthority, the early medieval west became dependent largely on the writingsof such Latin fathers as Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (d. 397), St Augustine ofHippo (354–430), and Pope Gregory the Great (590–604).

The writings of Gregory the Great helped popularize in the Latin west apackaged and somewhat simplified version of Augustinianism. Certainly, theAugustine whom one encounters in the political thinking of the western (orLatin) Middle Ages is not the Augustine whom one encounters in the pages ofthe City of God (De civitate dei), the “huge work” (ingens opus) and magister-ial theology of history that he was stimulated to write by the Visigothiccapture of Rome in 410, an event which for some contemporaries had seemedto herald the collapse of civilization itself. The political vision embeddedin that work was by archaic and classical standards a strikingly negative one,

The Carolingian Accommodation

89

fully in harmony with the desacralizing thrust of the New Testament itself andaccording, therefore, to the empires and commonwealths of this fallen world astrikingly limited role. They served, Augustine argued, as no more than a“punishment and remedy” for our sinful condition – punishment, because oftheir dependence on brute domination and the severity of coercive force;remedy, because by the application of that force, however harsh, they con-trived to secure a measure of the “earthly peace” or “harmonious agreementof citizens concerning the giving and obeying of orders” that human societiesdesperately needed if they were to survive at all.1 That for him, it should beemphasized, was as true of Christian commonwealths as it was for their pagancounterparts. To neither, in effect, and in this unlike Eusebius, did the Augus-tine of the City of God assign any role at all in the order of salvation.

It turns out, however, that the Augustine whom one usually encounters inthe Latin Middle Ages is the Augustine of the City of God only insofar as thatwork was reinterpreted in light of the tracts he wrote during the course of hislong and bitter struggle against the Donatist heretics in North Africa. In thosetracts, written, as it were, in the stress of battle, he was led to assert the princi-ple that Christian rulers were bound to use their power to punish and coercethose whom the ecclesiastical authorities condemned as heterodox. By sodoing, he was necessarily according a somewhat loftier dignity, higher author-ity, and more far-reaching responsibility to Christian rulers than to pagan. As aresult, medieval authors who did not fully share his sombre doctrine of grace,who rejected his sternly predestinarian division between the reprobate and theelect, and who saw instead in every member of the visible church a personalready touched by grace and potentially capable of citizenship in the City ofGod (the transtemporal and transpatial congregation of the blessed), brokedown the firm distinction between the City of God and the Christian societiesof this world that Augustine had drawn so firmly in all but a handful of texts inthe City of God itself. As a result, they understood him to be asserting that it isthe glorious destiny of Christian society – church, empire, Christian common-wealth, call it what you will – to work to inaugurate the Kingdom of God andthe reign of true justice in this world. Thus it is on Augustine’s glancing por-trayal of the ideal Christian emperor, that “happy emperor” who sees hispower as ministerial and uses it for the extension of God’s worship,2 that theCarolingian scholar Alcuin builds the vision of the Christian empire withwhich he associates the reign of Charlemagne. On that same portrayal, PopeGregory IV (827–44) believed that the emperor Louis the Pious might mostprofitably focus his attention. In similar vein, Pope Nicholas I (858–67) andother ninth-century authors who deployed Augustine’s authority and Augus-tinian texts contrive unwittingly not to render the precise thinking ofAugustine himself, but rather to place those texts at the service of what, in a

The Carolingian Accommodation

90

classic interpretation, H.-X. Arquillière called “political Augustinianism.” Bythat term he meant an essentially theocratic pattern of thought within themodalities of which there is a marked tendency to absorb the natural orderinto the supernatural, the profane laws of civil society into the sacred lawsmediated by the ecclesiastical order (whether under royal/imperial or episco-pal/papal leadership), and as a result, to interpret kingship as a divinelyordained and essentially ministerial office incorporated within (and at theservice of) the Christian church. In effect, and by one of those superb ironiesin which the history of ideas abounds, the name and prestige of Augustinebecame one of the instrumentalities whereby archaic notions of sacral king-ship, to all intents and purposes excluded by the New Testament vision ofpolitics, were nevertheless able to survive in Latin Christendom, just as, in theform of the Eusebian vision, they had been able to survive in the Byzantineeast. Charlemagne himself, certainly – and Einhard, his biographer, tells usthat he was especially fond of Augustine’s City of God – felt, like Constantinebefore him, that he had a particular responsibility for the welfare even of thoseChristians who lived beyond the confines of Christendom. Some scholars,indeed, have been bold enough to assert that “he considered it his mission tobuild the City of God on earth.”3

Whether or not that was the case (and the supportive evidence is admit-tedly slight), the fact remains that even in the thinking of the Augustine ofthe City of God there were some hesitations that rendered that work at leastsusceptible of being used to support “political Augustinianism.” This wasespecially so if that work was approached in the interpretative light cast by histracts against the Donatists; still more if its readers were predisposed so tointerpret it. It is in vain that one would search the pages of the New Testa-ment or the City of God itself for the roots of that predisposition. They mustbe sought instead elsewhere – in the ideological groundsoil of WesternEurope itself and, indeed, in three different layers deposited sequentiallyacross the course of time: first of all, in the religio-political attitudes charac-teristic of the peoples of Western Europe, Germanic as well as Celtic, duringthe era prior to their embrace of the Christian faith; second, in the sweepingtransformation in status undergone by the Christian Church during the lateRoman era, a transformation advanced still further by the socio-political con-ditions that came to prevail in the Germanic successor kingdoms of the westduring the course of the fifth to eighth centuries; third, in the attempt whichclerical thinkers made during those centuries to come to terms with thatchanged status and those conditions via an earnest exploitation of the frag-mentary patristic materials handed down to them and of the Old Testamenttexts that seemed to speak so directly to the conditions of their day. Thosethree layers we will probe in turn.

The Carolingian Accommodation

91

King by the Grace of God: Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon, andOttonian Kingship in the Early Middle Ages

In earlier sections of this book, I have described the striking process wherebythe increasingly Christianized late Roman world, with the help of what wehave called “the Eusebian accommodation,” succeeded in coming to termswith inherited ideas of imperial rulership and with their characteristic empha-sis on the exalted and sacred character of the emperor. While acknowledgingthat the claim could and has been contested, I have also argued that the Ger-manic peoples were later to bring with them into the conquered provinces ofthe erstwhile Roman empire of the west, their own particular variant of theworldwide pattern of sacral kingship. The tantalizingly fragmentary nature ofthe documentary evidence notwithstanding, such deeply rooted inheritancesfrom the past, barbarian no less than Roman, cannot simply be ignored. Norcan their continuing influence be discounted when one attempts to under-stand the ways in which the Romanized inhabitants of the successorkingdoms as well as their Ostrogothic, Visigothic, Anglo-Saxon, and, aboveall, Frankish conquerors themselves came to comprehend the status of theirkings and the nature of the authority they wielded.

In the early medieval church at large, certainly, the degree of accommoda-tion with the beliefs and practices of pagan society was not only quite strikingbut also in some measure intentional. On the missionary front the practice ofsubstituting Christian feasts for seasonal pagan celebrations, churches forpagan shrines, and the cult of some Christian saint for that of a local spirit ordeity, while viewed it seems as a shrewd and not inappropriate tactic,4 wasdestined to have enduring consequences. The African Christians of Augus-tine’s day regarded it as a devout practice “to take meal-cakes and bread andwine to the shrines of the saints on their memorial days,” and his motherMonica abandoned the practice only when they went to Milan whereSt Ambrose, recognizing it for what it was – a survival in barely Christianizedguise of the ancient cult of the dead – had forbidden it.5 In the years after thebarbarian invasions, it is doubtful whether bishops even of St Ambrose’sstature, confronted by less sophisticated flocks, would have attempted toimpose so ambitious a prohibition. By then, popular Christianity had cometo embrace too many quasi-pagan practices, and, for long centuries, it was tocontinue to do so. Noting, for example, that it drew a bitter protest from thegreat reforming pope, Gregory VII (1073–85), Marc Bloch drew attention(adducing illustrations from thirteenth-century France as well as eleventh-century Denmark) to the propensity of medieval people to view their localpriests as a species of magician, to be blamed in the event of illness or pesti-lence, and even sacrificed in the hope of ending an epidemic.6 Modern

The Carolingian Accommodation

92

sociologically oriented investigations, indeed, have raised serious doubtabout the degree to which some of the more remote rural areas in Catholicwestern Europe can ever really be said to have been Christianized at all. Asone might expect of a society that was overwhelmingly agrarian, the oldnature religion, with its sense of the indwelling of the divine in the naturalworld, its rites for the promotion of fertility, its nostrums for the preventionof natural disasters, proved to be exceedingly robust, so much so that half-understood remnants of such beliefs and practices survived in Europeanlegend and folklore right down into the nineteenth century.

That said, and given the degree to which Christian missionary effort wastargeted initially on kings rather than their subjects, it is hard to believe thatsome analogous measure of continuity or religious syncretism was altogetherabsent from the way in which early medieval Christians in western and north-ern Europe understood the nature of kingship. Even Alcuin, the great Anglo-Saxon scholarly luminary at Charlemagne’s palace school, did not refrain,when writing to the Northumbrian king Aethelred in 793, from associatingthe king’s own goodness with a mild climate, with the fertility of the land,and with the health of his people.7 It is true that the available evidence is notsuch as to support the postulation of some sort of direct connection betweenthe sacral nature of pagan Germanic kingship and the sanctity that earlymedieval peoples, from Anglo-Saxon England right across to central andeastern Europe, so often attributed to their monarchs. For centuries, in fact,and as has more than once been pointed out, there was something of a rivalrybetween the claims made for the Christian saint and those advanced on behalfof the sacral ruler. Even scholars who make a case for continuity betweenpagan royal sacrality and Christian dynastic sanctity have acknowledged thewariness evinced by the ecclesiastical authorities towards the popular cult ofroyal saints. But, that wariness may itself attest to the fact that contemporarychurchmen detected in that cult the penumbral remnants of pagan commit-ments, and it has been conceded as probable that in certain instances, at least,that royal cult did indeed incorporate notions stemming from the old paganvision of sacral kingship.8

The tenacious belief in the healing power of the royal touch, advancedalready on behalf of the Merovingian king Gunthram (592) and asserted offi-cially on behalf of the French and English kings from the eleventh to theeighteenth centuries, would have been inconceivable apart from some sur-vival into the Middle Ages of pre-Christian notions about the sacred status ofkings. It would have been inconceivable, too, without the willingness of theleading clergy to domesticate such notions within the boundaries of ecclesias-tical approval, even if, in order to do so, it meant stretching the framework ofChristian belief itself. So well domesticated indeed, ecclesiastically speaking,

The Carolingian Accommodation

93

was the royal practice of touching for scrofula that it was to survive theProtestant Reformation and even to find official expression in an order ofservice incorporated from 1633 to 1715 in the English Book of CommonPrayer.

The sweeping change of status which the Christian Church underwentduring the late Roman and early medieval centuries can only, one must sur-mise, have eased the way for clerics to make such accommodations with age-old notions concerning the sacrality of kings. As early as the third century,bishops had begun to act as legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in thechurches under their supervision. But they had been doing so as leaders ofprivate societies whose membership was no less voluntary than was that ofsuch comparable social organizations in the modern world as colleges, tradeunions, and fraternities. Theirs were organizations that directly concernedonly one segment of human activity, and their decisions as leaders possessedbinding force solely in the degree to which they were able to touch the con-sciences of the faithful. No more than the leadership of any modern privateorganization could they claim to wield any public coercive power. By the fifthcentury, however, Christianity had been transformed from the proscribedreligion of a suspect minority into the official religion of the empire, takingthe place, therefore, of the civic cult of pagan antiquity. As a result, ecclesias-tical authority, supported increasingly by the public force of the imperialadministration, was well on the way now to becoming political and coercivein nature. It was also beginning, especially in the beleaguered westernprovinces, to reach out into areas that we today would regard as pertainingto the state. That is to say, it was beginning to assume (as Pope Gregory theGreat was later to do at Rome itself) the burden of public functions in therealm, especially of what we today would call health, education, and welfare.Such developments intensified during the centuries that followed, and asovert paganism died out or was suppressed, membership of the Church andmembership of the state gradually moved close, in effect, to being cotermi-nous. The Church ceased to be a voluntary, private organization comparableto other social organizations and became instead a compulsory, all-inclusive,and coercive society comparable to what we call the state and, in its totality,well-nigh indistinguishable from it.

That state of affairs was evident already in the Visigothic kingdom in Spainduring the lifetime of Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) who, equating Churchand society, portrayed the king as ‘servant of God” (minister dei), divinelyappointed to rule that unitary society, with an authority that extended,accordingly, to matters religious in general and clerical discipline in particu-lar. Of early medieval authors, Isidore may well have been the most widelyread (he was certainly one of the most frequently cited) and his apprehension

The Carolingian Accommodation

94

of the facts on the ground and recognition (and approval) of the coalescenceinto a single society of what we would distinguish as “church” and “state”was doubtless influential. With the extinction of the Visigothic kingdom andthe rise of the Frankish people to leadership in Latin Christendom, thatprocess of coalescence was advanced still further. By the time of the emperorCharlemagne in the early ninth century, then, there had emerged in the Westa single, public society – Church, empire, Christian commonwealth – auniversal commonwealth that was neither voluntary nor private. To thatcommonwealth all Europeans, even after the collapse of the Carolingianempire, felt they belonged. So far as the Church went, its leadership was bythen deeply involved in affairs of state, its laws supported by the coercivepower of the civil ruler, and its membership well-nigh indistinguishable fromthat of civil society itself. And the beckoning vision of a universal common-wealth coterminous with Christendom, sustained in theory by shadowymemories of ancient Rome and guaranteed in practice by the universal andinternational character of the ecclesiastical structure itself, was to linger on tohaunt the purlieus of the European political imagination long after the rise toprominence of an array of de facto national monarchies until, with the adventof the Protestant Reformation, the unity of that ecclesiastical structure wasitself finally to be destroyed.

So far as what we are calling “the Carolingian accommodation” goes,attempts to postulate some sort of dramatic ideological revolution dating to751, when Pepin the Short, the Carolingian mayor of the palace (or de factoshogun-like ruler) deposed Childerich III, the last of the “do nothing”Merovingian kings, and took for himself the title of King of the Franks, donot measure up to the facts. Already by the early eighth century developingChurch practice, in its intermingling of the civil and ecclesiastical and espe-cially in the ill-defined authority it was willing to concede to kings in mattersreligious, clearly reflected a considerable degree of accommodation with thearchaic and pagan pattern of sacral kingship. It was left, however, to the(continental) clerical thinkers of the Carolingian era, along with their coun-terparts in Anglo-Saxon England and their successors in East Frankia underthe Ottonian and Salian emperors, to exploit the Bible and the patristic mate-rials available to them in an attempt to make some sort of theological peacewith this state of affairs. In that effort they were highly successful. Theirlegacy was the robust theoretical framework within which the theocraticform of kingship that emerged in the eighth century as the dominant politi-cal institution in early medieval Europe was able, for the next three centuriesand more, to flourish.

Although the lineaments of that Christianized and theocratic form ofmonarchy had begun to emerge in the seventh and early eighth centuries

The Carolingian Accommodation

95

under the Merovingian kings, the events of 751 which mark the end ofMerovingian and the beginning of Carolingian rule may serve us as a conve-nient point of departure. What those events involved, it might seem, wasnothing more than a forthright recognition of where the realities of poweralready lay. But that was not the way in which they were viewed at the time.To explain why this should have been so would be difficult without acknowl-edging the stubbornly sacral character which, despite the Christianization ofFrankia and their loss of what we would recognize as real “political” power,had clung to the kings of the Merovingian dynasty. We have seen that theirstature as “do-nothing” kings had parallels among sacral monarchies in otherparts of the world. Their insistence, unlike the rest of the Franks, in wearingtheir hair long may well have been of religio-magical significance (an inter-pretation supported by Vandal and Norwegian parallels), as also the customwhereby they traveled around (like the German fertility goddess Nerthus) ina cart (sacred chariot?) drawn by white oxen.9 Certainly, the precise way inwhich Pepin went about the business of disposing of Childerich, and theextreme caution with which he approached that delicate task, does suggestthat he viewed it as fraught with some sort of danger.

His moves, therefore, were of a deliberate nature. Only after he had con-sulted the pope and received his encouragement did Pepin proceed to thedeposition. He went about it, moreover, by having both Childerich and hisson shorn of their long hair and incarcerated in a monastery. At the sametime, he himself, in what for the Frankish kingship was an innovation, wasritually anointed as king, first by St Boniface, functioning as papal legate,then, a little later, by the pope himself. Given the brevity of the sources, it isadmittedly hard to be sure about the precise significance attaching to thesemoves. But the tonsure can plausibly be interpreted as a ritual deprivation ofthe sacred power inherent, as it were, in the blood of the Merovingian royalfamily, and the anointing with chrism – the ancient Near Eastern rite for thetransference of someone from the sphere of the profane into that of thesacred – as “a piece of church magic”10 intended to serve as a religious substi-tute compensating for the Carolingian lack of any such sacral inheritance orGeblütsheiligkeit.

If the ancient rite of unction could still be seen to serve such a purpose itwas because it had been hallowed by Old Testament example and Christianliturgical practice alike. It had played an important role in Hebraic ceremo-nial and had been adapted to Christian purposes, especially for baptism andconfirmation, for the ordination of priests, and also (though later) for theconsecration of bishops. More specifically, as we have seen, the Israelites hadadopted it for the initiation of their kings. In an era, then, in which literacywas largely a clerical monopoly, it is comprehensible that biblical parallels

The Carolingian Accommodation

96

should have proved to be so powerfully persuasive. As a result, as Marc Blochonce put it, it was the Bible itself, however ironically, that afforded in theWest “the means of reintegrating the sacral royalty of ancient times into theframework of Christian legality.”11 As early as the seventh century unctionhad become part of the ceremonial initiation of the Visigothic kings of Spain,and, in the early eighth century it may, on biblical grounds, have been addedfor a while to the essentially pagan inaugural rites of the Irish kings. Cer-tainly, after its appearance in Frankia in 751 and England in 786/7 it wenton to become the norm in the ninth-century Carolingian kingdoms, spread-ing thence, eventually, throughout the greater part of western Europe. Whilesome local differences did persist, the usages prevalent in Anglo-SaxonEngland, West Frankia and East Frankia came to influence one another inintricate and complex ways, contriving in the end to produce liturgical formsthat were genuinely international in character.

In the case of Frankia, where the fortunes of the Carolingian monarchsdepended in marked degree upon the closeness of their affiliation with thearistocracy, no little importance attached to the fact that the papacy itselflinked the anointing of the Frankish kings with the peculiar destiny as a holyand chosen people of the Frankish nation as a whole. Ernst Kantorowicz hasargued that, ever since their conclusive victory early in the eighth centuryover the Arab invaders of Gaul, the Franks “had begun to think of themselvesas the new people chosen by God, the ‘new sacred people of promise,’ asthey were styled by the Holy See [itself].” Hence, as the new Israel, “theyendeavored, as it were, to wheel into Church history as the continuatorsof Israel’s exploits rather than into Roman history as the heirs of paganRome.”12 The rite of royal anointing was suited admirably to promote suchviews, and along with its introduction into the Frankish realms went anintensification of the clerical habit of comparing the position and attributesof the Frankish monarchs with the sacral position and priestly attributes ofthe Old Testament kings, as well as with those of Moses and of Melchisedek,king and priest. This development becomes most strikingly evident in theCarolingian era, when contemporaries were prone to portraying the Frankishkingdom as itself “the kingdom of David.” During that period, too, theFrankish king, being like his Old Testament forebears the anointed of God,came to regard himself and was in turn so regarded by his people, as a newMoses, a new David, a new Solomon, a truly sacral monarch worthy of beinggreeted by the assembled clerics of his kingdom as nothing less than “kingand priest.”

In such an atmosphere, charged as it was with the memory of Davidickingship and saturated with the language and imagery of the Old Testament(to such a degree, indeed, that contemporary history must sometimes have

The Carolingian Accommodation

97

felt like a replay of biblical history), it is understandable that the desacralizingthrust of the New Testament should have been blunted, and that thereshould have grown up around the Carolingian rulers and their successors inmore than one part of western Europe a version of the archaic ruler cult,though one played out now along the axis of a salvation history that was atonce recognizably Christian and distinctively western. Already in the seventhcentury Visigothic and Lombard kings had been referred to as kings by divinegrace (or favor), and in the eighth century Ine, King of Wessex (d. 725)had described himself as king “mid Godes gife.” Rex dei gratia (“king bythe grace of God”), a title still inscribed on British coinage, became with theCarolingian rulers of Frankia a standard formulation of the notion that kingsreigned by divine ordination.13 In the Laudes regiae, the liturgical acclama-tions of the Carolingian kings which date back to the late eighth century, thehierarchy of rulers on earth is portrayed as a reflection or counterpart of theheavenly hierarchy, and the king as triumphant warrior is acclaimed in, with,or through his divine analogy, the supreme, conquering king of heaven.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the modern distinction between ecclesi-astical and temporal governance was to remain as alien to these theocratickings and to their successors in western Europe for the next two centuries asit had been to those Israelite kings in whom, by virtue of their commonunction, the clerical ideologists encouraged them to perceive their directforebears. In the 877 liturgical “order” for the royal consecration, the “holychurch” is simply equated with “the Christian people” committed to theking’s care. Similarly, in the preface to the Libri Carolini, an important pieceof court propaganda dating to the late eighth century, Charlemagne is desig-nated as the governor of “the kingdom of the Holy Church.”14 No idlewords, these, as the defeated Saxons were to learn when Charlemagne forcedthem to accept baptism. Whatever his empire was, it was certainly a commu-nity of belief and he was the Christian ruler of a Christian people. Religiousresponsibilities clearly lay at the heart of his royal charge. Of one set ofinstructions he gave to his missi dominici (agents of the central administra-tion) as they made their supervisory rounds visiting those charged with thegovernance of the various imperial territories, Arquillière (noting their stresson virtuous living and eternal salvation) was moved to declare: “this docu-ment . . . is not an administrative text: it is an apostolic act!”15 As themodalities of his administrative oversight no less than his legislation andcourt propaganda indicate, Charlemagne clearly regarded himself as chargedwith the task of leading his subjects to their eternal salvation, to such anextent, indeed, that not even matters of doctrine escaped his scrutiny orfailed to reflect his decisive influence.

That being so, it is readily comprehensible that St Augustine’s essentially

The Carolingian Accommodation

98

secular understanding of the role and status of civil rulers should be lost sightof during the early medieval centuries, and that the prestige of Augustine’sname should come to be attached, not to the sombre and New Testament-oriented Augustinianism of the City of God, but to the theocratic pattern ofthought now commonly referred to as “political Augustinianism.” In thisconnection, because his work circulated under the name (and authority) ofAugustine and, as a result, came to be widely quoted in the early collectionsof canon law, mention should be made of the anonymous fourth-centurywriter whom we know as “Ambrosiaster.” Often described as something ofan ideological counterpart in the west to Eusebius in the east, he draws thetraditional Hellenistic parallels between polytheism and anarchy, monothe-ism and monarchy. He also goes on to conclude that the emperor is the vicarof God and, as such, alone worthy of adoration (proskynesis), and, in acurious but influential statement, notes that “the king bears the image ofGod, just as the bishop bears that of Christ.”16

But although such ideas and motifs of Hellenistic or Roman provenancegradually clustered around it, it was above all the cultus of biblical kingshipthat continued to provide the ideological underpinnings for early medievaltheocratic kingship. That form of kingship flourished not only in Englandand the Carolingian empire but also, after the latter’s disintegration, becamethe norm in the successor kingdoms of France, Italy, and Germany whichwere eventually to pursue their own distinctive destinies. Not least of all didit flourish under the Saxon and Salian rulers of Germany who, from themoment of Otto I’s imperial coronation at Rome in 962, were destined torule that revived “Empire of the Romans” which, in the fullness of time,came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire. To that cultus the sacramentof unction (or rite of anointing) was central. And the notions that clusteredaround it found broadly influential expression in the great liturgies elabo-rated for the coronation of European kings, as well as in the iconographicalrepresentations of such events.

Flourishing as it did over so wide an area and for so long a time, the ideol-ogy which characteristically underpinned this type of theocratic kingshipobviously betrayed many a variation – too many, indeed, to dwell on here. Acouple of them, however, both reflecting developments across the course oftime, are too important to pass over in silence. The first, evident from thelate ninth century onwards, is the increasing clericalization of the royal officein western Europe. The second, increasingly evident in the tenth and earlyeleventh centuries, and especially so in Germany, is the degree to which king-ship came to be understood in specifically Christocentric rather than moregenerally theocentric terms.

The Carolingian Accommodation

99

The Christocentric or “Liturgical” Kingship of theTenth and Eleventh Centuries

Of Charlemagne and his dynasty, Pope Stephen III (768–72) had alreadybeen willing to affirm that they were “a holy race, royal and sacerdotal,” andthe bishops assembled in 794 at the Council of Frankfurt had similarlyacclaimed him as “king and priest.”17 With unction now firmly established asan integral part of the royal and imperial coronation ceremonies, it was inthe period stretching from the late ninth to the eleventh centuries that theclericalization of the royal office was to become increasingly prominent.Anointed like bishops with the holy chrism in a coronation ceremonymodeled on and strikingly similar to that for the consecration of a bishop, theking was regarded accordingly as endowed henceforth with a priestly or cleri-cal status. Even a church reformer of the stature of St Peter Damiani(1007–72) shared the widespread view that, like the consecration of a bishop,the anointing of a king constituted a sacrament. The precise nature of theclerical status it conferred was not, admittedly, precisely defined. But that didnot preclude its explicit liturgical affirmation. Thus, in the coronation ordo ofthe tenth-century German kings it was stipulated that the Archbishop ofMainz should adjure the king to “receive the crown of the realm at the handsof the bishops . . . and through this thy crown know thyself as partaker in ouroffice.” And from the tenth century to the twelfth (when it was quietlydropped) the formula “and here the lord pope makes the emperor-elect intoa cleric” was included in the liturgy for the imperial coronation. All of this, asWido of Osnabrück emphasized in 1084–5, because, “being anointed withthe oil of consecration, he participates in the priestly ministry” and isremoved from the ranks of the laity.18

The second noteworthy development is a related one, namely, the degreeto which kingship in the tenth and eleventh centuries became specificallyChristocentric in nature, rather than simply theocentric as had been theDavidic kingship of the Carolingians. In the eighth century Cathwulf, anauthor about whom we know very little but who clearly vibrated to thesame ideological frequencies as had Ambrosiaster, could address Charle-magne as the vicegerent of God, whereas he relegates the bishop to “thesecond place” as “only the vicegerent of Christ.”19 By the tenth century,however, under the influence, perhaps, of the growing clericalization of theroyal office and, certainly, of the “uncompromisingly Christocentric”nature of contemporary monastic piety, the kingship of the Ottonian andSalian rulers of Germany and of the rulers of Anglo-Saxon England hadbecome, in effect, “liturgical.” That is to say, it had come to be centerednot, as in the Carolingian era, on God the Father, but on Christ, the God-

The Carolingian Accommodation

100

man whom they imitated and represented. In the eleventh century PeterDamiani stressed that in the person of the king Christ is to be recognized astruly reigning. In the same century the historian Wipo portrayed the Arch-bishop of Mainz as having said to the German king Conrad II in 1031:“You are the Vicar of Christ. No one but his imitator is a true ruler.”20 Inthe previous century, as Ernst Kantorowicz pointed out, in the celebratedminiature produced in the Abbey of Reichenau and incorporated in theGospel Book of Aachen, the emperor is depicted as elevated to heaven,enthroned in glory, as not merely the Vicar of Christ “but almost like theKing of Glory himself.” “It is as though,” he says, “the God-man had cededhis celestial throne to the glory of the terrestrial emperor for the purpose ofallowing the invisible Christus in heaven to become manifest in the christus[imperial anointed one] on earth.”21

In arguing thus, Kantorowicz draws insistent parallels with an intriguingset of writings which witness to the clericalization of the royal office, andwhich reflect in thought no less than language the powerful influenceexerted by the contemporary coronation ordines and liturgical texts. As aresult, they give classic theoretical expression to what may be called the ideol-ogy of liturgical kingship.

The writings in question, which date to around 1100, are the Tractates ofan unknown Norman or Anglo-Norman cleric traditionally referred to as“the Anonymous of York.” While it was once common to view them aslooking backward to a world of ideas already disintegrating by the time oftheir composition, that is no longer the case. Scholars now appear more dis-posed to regard them as expressing, not simply the political ideals of the tenthand early eleventh centuries, but even the avant garde views of their own era.Whatever the case, the ideals to which they attest were as current in Franceand England as they were in Germany. As a group of texts, the Tractatesexpound “the christocentric theory of kingship in its most concentrated,most consistent, and most extreme form.”22 They constitute, in effect, afitting, peak expression of that complex movement of thought which, out ofGermanic, Romano-Hellenistic, patristic and, above all, biblical materials,had fashioned another Christianized but, this time, distinctively western,theory of sacral monarchy and embedded it firmly in the unfolding saga ofsalvation history. Their somewhat esoteric nature notwithstanding, theywarrant, by way of striking illustration of a remarkable phenomenon and as afitting conclusion to this chapter, a measure of closer scrutiny.

The 33 Tractates attributed to the Anonymous, some of them no morethan fragments, cover a wide array of topics. But in several minor and twomajor pieces (notably the De consecratione pontificum et regum) the authorsets forth his ecclesiastico-political views with a measure of vigor that is not

The Carolingian Accommodation

101

The Carolingian Accommodation

102

Figure 6 The German Empire. The Emperor Otto III in majesty. A miniature of theReichenau School (c.996) in the Aachen Cathedral Treasury: Gospel Book, fol. 16r.(© Domkapitel Aachen. photo: Ann Münchow). See note 21

always, it must be conceded, matched by a comparable degree of clarity.Though there is something of a parallel between his general approach andwhat may be labeled “the Ambrosiaster tradition,” his departure from thattradition is an interesting one. Whereas Ambrosiaster in the fourth century,Cathwulf towards the end of the eighth, and Hugh of Fleury in the earlytwelfth century, all portrayed the king as the image of God and the bishopas (no more than) the image of Christ, the vision of kingship which theAnonymous advanced was quite explicitly Christocentric. If that was so, itwas by virtue of the fact that he had elaborated a peculiarly convoluted Chris-tology. For him, Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the true Melchisedek, kingand priest. But whereas he was king by virtue of his divine nature and, there-fore, through all eternity, he was priest by virtue of his human nature and, asa result, only in time – only, that is, “up to eternity.” With this distinction ofnatures the Anonymous correlated a further distinction which enabled himto speak of Jesus both as a “Christ by nature” by virtue of his divinity, and asa “Christ by grace” by virtue of his “anointed humanity.” The “Christ bynature,” uncreated eternal king, the Anonymous regarded as equal to Godthe Father. In Jesus’s functioning as Creator of the universe and regeneratorof fallen man, the Anonymous represented him, therefore, very much asindistinguishable from the Father. As such he is clearly not to be confusedwith the “Christ by grace” who, by assuming a created humanity and con-cealing his royalty, became a priest, and who is, therefore, less than the Fatherand, indeed, subordinate to him.23

As was the case with the imperial Christology that Eusebius of Caesareahad elaborated eight centuries earlier, such formulations are doubtless irritat-ingly abstruse ones. But they cannot be bypassed because upon them reststhe whole structure of the Anonymous’s political theology. “On the highChristology of the Eternal Christ,” George Williams has said,

the Anonymous grounds the power of rulers. Thanks to his two Chris-tologies the Anonymous’s political theory, while seemingly Christocentric,will tend to be Theocentric, because the Person of the Humbled Christ hasbeen reduced in significance and may no longer be said to exercise a pre-dominant influence over the conception and image of the God of theUniverse. On his “low” Christology of the Humbled Nazarene sacerdos[priest] who put off or rather concealed his royal nature the Anonymousbases clerical authority.24

The manner in which this political theology is worked out is complex enoughto defy any summary incapsulation. It is possible here merely to sketch in twomain lines of argument which (at the expense, perhaps, of a little distortion)

The Carolingian Accommodation

103

may be said to control and to dominate the Anonymous’s entire pattern ofthinking.

According to the first of these, and under the New Testament dispensa-tion no less than that of the Old, king and priest are both “consecrated withthe unction of holy oil and sanctified by divine blessing,” so that both –themselves now Christs by grace – are “one with God and His Christ . . . veryGods and Christs by the adoption of the Spirit.” Thus

each in his office is the figure and image of Christ and God. The priest, ofthe Priest; the king, of the King. The priest, of His lower office andnature: that is of His humanity; the king, of the higher: that is of Hisdivinity. For Christ, God and Man, is the true and highest King and Priest.

From this it follows that “as an imitation and emulation of the better andhigher nature or power of Christ,” the king and the royal power are “greaterand higher,” too, and that there is nothing unjust about the priestly dignitybeing “instituted through the regal and subjected to it, because even so itwas done in Christ.”25

If human kingship is thus related to the “Christ by nature” (i.e., theeternal, royal Christ) and, therefore, to God the Father, with the humanpriesthood related, in contrast, to Jesus of Nazareth (i.e., the human, priestly,and distinctly subordinate “Christ by grace”), and if the appropriate conclu-sions are drawn therefrom, then the essentially sacred nature of kingship andits concomitant superiority even in matters ecclesiastical are accordinglyenhanced. And they are enhanced still further by the second principal line ofargument that the Anonymous pursues. According to this the Christian king,by virtue of the sacrament of unction which transforms him into a “Christ bygrace” becomes not only an image of the royal God-Christ but also, incommon with the bishop and priest, an image of the sacerdotal Christ-Man.As a result, and after the fashion of the biblical Melchizedek, he becomespriest as well as king. And as such, the Anonymous further asserts, he is pos-sessed not only of the responsibility for guiding the church but also of thepower to remit sins and to offer the bread and wine in sacrifice.26

In advancing these last curious claims the Anonymous appeals (as, indeed,he does elsewhere) to the tenth-century English formulary for the royalcoronation that is known to scholars as “the Edgar ordo.” That being so, it isconceivable that what is intended in the case of the remission of sins may benothing more than the granting of the usual coronation amnesty. Similarly,in the case of the royal offering, nothing more may be envisaged than thepractice whereby the English king after the coronation itself (in this, like theByzantine and German emperors for that matter) presented to the clergy

The Carolingian Accommodation

104

officiating at the Mass the bread and wine which, after their consecration, hewould himself receive at communion. The texts, however, though not fullyclear on this point, suggest the possibility, at least, that something more wasintended. In the case of the royal offering it may be that the king was beingcast in the role of representative communicant making the offering on behalfof the collective Christian people. And by the reference to his remission ofsins, it may also be that the consecrated king was being conceived in a fashionredolent of the pagan sacral monarchs as propitiating for the sins of hispeople, mediating between them and God, serving in fact, and by virtue ofthe grace divinely bestowed upon him, as in some sense their “savior.”27

These are, of course, extraordinary claims to make in connection with anyChristian political leader. But, then, they serve to confirm that the king wasbeing conceived as something more than a “political” leader in our modern,restricted sense of that term. And they serve also to underline the fact that thesociety over which he ruled was conceived as something more than a merelycivil society. The Anonymous explicitly equates “the Christian people” overwhich, by virtue of the sacred unction, the king was divinely authorized torule with “the holy Church of God.” When, centuries earlier, Pope Gelasiushad spoken of the two powers, sacerdotal and royal, which rule “this world,”what he had actually meant by “this world” (hoc mundum), or so the Anony-mous insists, was in fact nothing other than “the holy Church.” The king-dom over which the king is called to exercise the supreme power is, then, tobe identified with the Church “which is,” we are then told, “the Kingdom ofGod.” It is “the Kingdom of Christ” in which the royal and sacerdotalpowers are no longer divided and in which the king reigns “together withChrist.”28 So that, as Williams summarizes the position

In marked contrast to the Gelasian dictum that Christ had expresslysevered the regal and the priestly powers out of recognition of their abusewhen united in any but the divine, the Anonymous asserts the divinity ofkings by consecration, the fusion of two natures, divine and human, andhence the king’s Christlike competence in both the temporal and spiritualrealms. The Anonymous holds that the Celestial Christ so far approves ofthe rejoining of the royal and sacerdotal functions that the king, by virtueof the apotheosis [resulting from the sacred anointing], may be said to co-rule with Him.29

That being the case, there should be little to surprise us in the Anonymous’sfurther willingness to portray the coronation feast in Eusebian fashion as akind of messianic banquet, to designate the king as mediator and shepherd-redeemer, to accord to him the messianic prerogatives, or to apply to him the

The Carolingian Accommodation

105

messianic sayings set forth in Isaiah (22:22; 42:7). Nor should there be muchto surprise in the sense persistently conveyed that the Kingdom of God is, atleast in part, being “realized within history through the progressive achieve-ment of the royal christi.”30

While in all of this, there is something of Ambrosiaster and more than oneharmonic of the Christianized Eusebian version of the Hellenistic philosophyof kingship which was to continue for centuries to dominate Byzantine polit-ical thinking, the Tractates themselves contain little evidence to suggest anydirect appropriation of such Hellenistic notions. Instead, the Anonymousgrounds his position on biblical precedent, on intimations drawn from theold collections of canon law, and, above all, from what he takes the sacramentof royal anointing to imply. His particular version of “royal messianism,” ithas been said, “is demonstrably dependent on the Edgar ordo” of 973.31 Andthat observation is a telling one, especially if one recalls Marc Bloch’swarning about the danger of depending too much upon theorists and the-ologians if one truly aspires to penetrate the mentality that sustained theregal “idolatry” of the era. If, behind the arguments of the Anonymous didnot stand the supportive framework provided by the sturdy structure of litur-gical practice and symbolic gesture, buttressed also (as Kantorowicz andothers have demonstrated) by the royal and imperial iconography of the era,one would be tempted to dismiss them as the stuff of fantasy, as whollyunrepresentative, as the product of anachronistic clerical intellectualizingpossessed of no real rootage in the life of the era. In fact, it becomes increas-ingly clear, these arguments were more representative of the thinking of theAnonymous’s own era and of the two centuries preceding than it was usual inthe past to concede. Clerical in origin and inspiration such notions may havebeen, but one would be unwise to conclude from that that even Ottonianand Salian noblemen, however difficult and rambunctious they could oftenbe, were necessarily prone to scoffing at them or brushing them to one side.

If one takes a moment now to stand back a little from the rich complexityof this Western ideology of kingship and to readmit the Byzantine experienceinto the orbit, at least, of one’s peripheral vision, the temptation to align theAnonymous with Eusebius becomes, admittedly, quite strong. That tempta-tion is very much to the point. However different their overall inspirationand the particular materials out of which they construct their respective posi-tions, the general thrust of their argumentation is not dissimilar. Itunderlines the extraordinary tenacity of the dominion which archaic notionsof royal sacrality have exercised over the human psyche. More specifically, itunderlines the degree to which messianic notions and Christological con-cerns opened up a route whereby such pagan notions, linked after all withthe cosmic religiosity and inspired by the cyclic rhythms of nature, were still

The Carolingian Accommodation

106

able to enter and colonize a Christian consciousness that was essentially his-torical in its orientation.

Beyond that, moreover, and insofar as the thrust of their argumentationleads both Eusebius and the Anonymous to assign to kings and emperors arole in the unfolding of the drama of salvation history and to see the king-doms and empires of this world as standing in close relation to the Kingdomof God, it also leads them both to adopt a stance diametrically opposed tothe controlling position which Augustine had hammered out in close accordwith New Testament teaching. If the ideas of the Anonymous were doomedto a much less successful career in the west than that enjoyed by the Eusebianideology in the east, we should attribute that fact less to any comparative lackof cogency or lack of roots in contemporary patterns of thought than to thepresence in the west of a whole range of factors differentiating the climate ofopinion there from that prevailing in the Byzantine world.

With the recovery of Europe in the late tenth and eleventh centuries fromthe devastation and confusion caused in religious no less than political life bythe last great wave of barbarian invasions (Scandinavian and Magyar) tobreak upon the west, and with the convergence in the mid-eleventh centuryof twin reforming movements (royal and monastic) intent upon the restora-tion of church order, those factors came to the fore. When they did so theyprecipitated the first great ideological revolution in the religious and politicallife of the Latin west. To that historic upheaval of the spirit we must nowturn.

The Carolingian Accommodation

107

In the pages preceding, I have been at pains to emphasize the remarkabledegree to which archaic and pagan notions of sacral kingship succeeded inacclimatizing themselves to the alien religious conditions prevailing alike inthe Byzantine east and the Latin west. The success of that accommodation isnot to be gainsaid. Neither should it be taken for granted. Things could easilyhave turned out otherwise, and it is only, I would suggest, our familiarity withthe outcome that has contrived to persuade us of the necessity of the process.Embedded over the course of unimaginable vastnesses of time and space inone or other version of what I have called the cosmic religiosity, notions ofsacral kingship, in order to survive the triumph of Christianity, had somehowto be adapted to, or succeed in rooting themselves in, the soil of a vastly dif-ferent ideological universe. In that transformed world the relationship of thehuman with the divine was destined henceforth to be played out, not as acomfortably integral part of the predictably cyclic and eternal recurrences ofthe natural world, but in the open-ended and turbulent arena of the historical,fraught inevitably with a disturbing potential for novelty and instability. Soroot themselves of course they did, and their success in so doing surely callsfor no further elaboration here. It is time, instead, to shift the focus and todwell now on the concomitants of that success, on the inevitable shallownessand delicacy of the root-systems’ archaic notions of sacral monarchy couldexpect to establish in fundamentally hostile Christian soil, and on the conse-quent fragility of their continued access to ideological nutrition.

Kingship, it will be recalled, had come late to the ancient Israelites andhad arrived as something of a foreign novelty. Its initial reception had beensomewhat ambivalent; its subsequent history comparatively brief. In thecontext of the Yahwist religion it had been dogged persistently by the suspi-cion that it threatened to derogate from the supreme kingship of thetranscendent and omnipotent creator-God. And while, after its demise in the

5The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval

and Early Modern EuropePapal, Imperial, National

108

late pre-Christian era, it had lived on in the guise of the messianic hope thatChristians were themselves to inherit, that hope, despite its clothing in thevocabulary of sacred monarchy, was destined to be transformed into anadamantly other-worldly set of aspirations. Only in the fourth century, afterall, having lived for 300 years as a people set apart, did Christians finally feelmoved to grope their way towards some sort of an accommodation with thesacred aura attaching to their imperial rulers. And, even then, they did souneasily and without unanimity, embedding as a result in what was inevitablyto be a conflicted record reservations and qualifications that would return tohaunt the would-be imperial dreams of their medieval and early modern suc-cessors. These reservations and qualifications, in effect, left open for futuregenerations of Christian (and especially clerical) leadership the possibility ofchallenging the degree to which their kings had somehow come to beendowed with a sacred aura and charged with a quasi-priestly role in (andover) the Church. That possibility proved to be especially beckoning in thewest where there emerged in the early medieval centuries a counter-currentof ecclesiastico-political thinking that we have contrived, thus far, to passover more or less in total silence. Namely, that which, while focusing on thedivinely ordained and ministerial character of kingship and on the impor-tance of unction in the bestowal of royal authority, did so in such a way as tohighlight the crucial nature of the episcopal role in the administration of thatsacrament, and to emphasize, accordingly, the subordination of the royalauthority to the ecclesiastical.

In terms of the practical politics of the era of Carolingian hegemony, theecclesiastical establishment, Janet Nelson has properly insisted, “was part ofthe realm and the king’s obligation to safeguard it an essential part of his pat-rimonial role.” At the same time, at least in clerical theory, “the realm, andthe king’s job were contained within the Church.”1 And for some years inthe ninth century, when Carolingian rulers had proved themselves less ableto deliver on their obligations, clerical theory had come in fact to bear somepractical fruit at the expense of royal authority. Hincmar, Archbishop ofRheims (d. 861), a man who had devoted much effort to the elaboration ofrites of royal consecration, had been moved, nonetheless, to argue that noman since the coming of Christ could be both king and priest. He was led,accordingly, to assert the authority of bishops, not simply over the king asindividual Christian believer, but over the way in which he was discharginghis royal office. Such aspirations to clerical hegemony or assertions of clericalindependence proved, in the event, to be evanescent. They serve, neverthe-less, to hoist warning signals for any historian so impressed with the sacralaura attaching to the kings of early medieval Europe as to be tempted to losesight of the formidable barriers which the Yahwist religion of the ancient

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

109

Hebrews and the subsequent crystallization of Christian belief had erectedagainst any truly enduring absorption of archaic notions of sacral kingship.Among those barriers it would be difficult to overemphasize the importanceof a second factor which, despite its intermittent moments of prominence,we have again contrived thus far largely to ignore. What I have in mind isthe persistence across the centuries not merely of a distinct clerical orderbut, within that order, of a unique locus of divinely-conferred authority andpower, namely, the institution of the papacy at Rome.

Just how very important that particular factor could be had becomeevident already in the lifetime of the Anglo-Norman Anonymous himself. Bythe mid-eleventh century, the twin efforts of royal and monastic reformers toreestablish a measure of ecclesiastical order had come together under theleadership of a reformed and reinvigorated papacy now delivered from thecorrupting tutelage of the Roman aristocracy. Moved by their partial re-appropriation of the New Testament and Augustinian political vision, andadamant in their insistence on the ultimate superiority of the spiritual author-ity to the temporal, the popes had been moved in the latter half of thatcentury to launch a frontal assault upon the supportive ideology of liturgicalkingship in particular and of sacral monarchy in general. By so doing, theysponsored the first great ideological revolution in the religious and politicallife of the west, one less well known to the general reader than the ProtestantReformation of the sixteenth century, but arguably comparable in its dimen-sions and in the wide-ranging nature of its impact. For that great upheaval ofthe spirit, by evoking Christian roots and denouncing as dangerously com-promising so many of the pragmatic compromises which the Church hadmade with the social and political conditions prevailing in the late antiqueand early medieval centuries, called into question the whole, extraordinaryset of accommodations which, from the time of Constantine onwards, Chris-tians had contrived to make with the sacred aura attaching to pagan kingship.In the course of that revolutionary upheaval, the supporters of PopeGregory VII (1073–85) had boldly proclaimed that “the age of priest-kingsand emperor-pontiffs” was over. But the tangled skein of history was destinedonce more to demonstrate its persistently ironic nature, and the obituary thusproclaimed, we shall see now as we come to focus on the papal, imperial, andnational monarchies of medieval and early modern Europe, was to provemore than a trifle premature.

The Emergence and Consolidation of the Papal Monarchy

The developmental process whereby the medieval papacy rose to prominencewas an uneven one, punctuated by periods of humiliating subordination to

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

110

the ambitions of the local Roman aristocracy. By the eleventh century, never-theless, the ancient primacy of honor attaching to the popes as bishops of theold imperial capital where the apostles Peter and Paul were both believed tohave suffered martyrdom and of which Peter was believed to have been thefirst bishop, had long since begun to modulate into a primacy that involvedclaims to jurisdictional or governmental authority over the various provincialchurches of the west. Such claims, often couched in an essentially legal andpolitical vocabulary stemming from the traditions of Roman imperial admin-istration had been vigorously advanced by Pope Leo I (440–61), who hadattributed monarchical powers to the popes as successors of St Peter and hadattached to the papacy the old pagan imperial title of “supreme pontiff”(pontifex maximus) not long since abandoned by the emperors themselves.Later on, his example had been followed, notably by Gregory I (590–604)and Nicholas I (858–67). But amid the violence, political confusion, andecclesiastical disarray spawned in the early medieval centuries by successivewaves of barbarian invasions, it had proved impossible, across extendedperiods of time, to vindicate in practice any such claim to a species of univer-sal jurisdiction. Charlemagne, indeed, if we can believe his biographerEinhard, appears to have viewed the bishopric of Rome as nothing more thanthe leading metropolitan see in his empire.2 Similarly, for the Germanemperor Otto III “the popes were [seen] to be no more than high priestscharged with the ministry of prayer,”3 and it appears to have been the dispo-sition of his Salian successor Henry IV (1056–1106) simply to “consider thepope merely the head of the foremost church in an imperial system ofchurches.”4 His father Henry III (1039–56) had certainly treated them assuch when, taking to Rome itself his persistent effort to restore ecclesiasticalorder, he had summarily deposed three rival claimants to the papacy andgone on to appoint three others in succession, all of them Germans and thelast – Leo IX (1048–54) – his own cousin and a vigorous collaborator in thework of moral reform in the Church.

It was the great irony of this imperial achievement that it succeeded innudging the disparate efforts on behalf of a renewal of Church life towards acommon center at Rome. And it was via its energetic leadership of successfulchurch-wide reform and, from 1095 onwards, its channeling of the martialenergies of western Europe into the great crusading effort to recover and holdthe Holy Land, that the medieval papacy was to rise to hegemony. The posses-sion of such spiritual titles as bishop, patriarch, pope, successor of St Peter,vicar of Christ, servant of the servants of God notwithstanding, that hege-mony was to be imperial in nature. For the papal office, as it emerged in thehigh Middle Ages and has persisted down to the present, was, no less in itsinner reality than in its self-presentation, to be an essentially monarchical one.

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

111

Scattered intimations of that ultimate destiny may be detected during thecenturies prior to the revolutionary departures of the late eleventh century.Notable among them was the forged document dating to the mid-eighthcentury that we know as the “Donation of Constantine.” By virtue of itsinclusion in the mid-ninth century collection of forgeries exalting the powerof pope and bishops and known to historians as the False or Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, and its transmission thence into the Decretum of Gratian(c.1140), the great medieval textbook of canon law, the Donation wasreadily available for exploitation by later papal propagandists. In that forgeddocument the emperor Constantine is represented as having endowed PopeSylvester I and his papal successors with the rulership of Rome, Italy, and thewestern provinces of the empire, and as having transferred to him the use ofthe imperial regalia – scepter, crimson cloak, crown, and phrygium, the lastbeing in fact a piece of white, pointed headgear of Byzantine origin. As aresult, and, it seems, by deliberate intent, the Donation depicts the pope asoccupying a position equal in status with that of the emperor, as placed at“the centre of the concept of empire,” and as clothed “in the splendourwhich surrounded the earthly imperator.”5 As a result, the document waslater to lend itself to extensive use by the defenders of a papal sovereignty inmatters temporal. It did so, however, only after Innocent IV (1243–54) hadreinterpreted it as describing not so much a conferral of sovereign power onthe popes as a restitution to them of a sovereignty, or “royal monarchy in theapostolic see” that Christ himself had conferred on the papal vicar of Christ.6

In the earlier emergence, then, and initial development of such claimsamong the circle of leading reformers whom Leo IX had assembled at Rome,the Donation had played little part. After the deaths of Leo IX and Henry IIIand under the turbulent conditions attendant upon the minority ofHenry IV, those leaders, prominent among them Cardinal Humbert of SilvaCandida (d. 1061) and Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, were moved toextend the reach of their reforming efforts beyond the original focus onmoral reform, which had permitted imperial collaboration, and into thematter of the role traditionally played by emperors and kings in the profitablearena of clerical appointments. And there imperial collaboration was under-standably not forthcoming. In the centuries preceding, the custom ofimperial and royal control over the higher church offices had become asdeeply rooted in social custom and ecclesiastical tradition as was the “peculiarinstitution” of slavery in the southern states of the Union prior to the CivilWar. With it went the royal custom of investing bishops with the spiritualsymbols of ring and pastoral staff which the reformers now construed asinvolving the usurpation by a layman of a priestly, sacramental function. Thatcustom came now under attack. And in 1075 a disastrous clash occurred

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

112

between pope and emperor when the young Henry IV, seeking to vindicatethe full range of powers over the Church that his predecessors had wielded,was confronted in Gregory VII by an old and unbending reformer who, witha single-mindedness and intensity of purpose that would have done credit toa New England abolitionist of the nineteenth century, had brushed asidethe pleas of the moderates and gradualists among his fellow-reformers withthe fateful words: “The Lord hath not said: ‘I am Tradition,’ but ‘I am theTruth’. ”

On the detailed history of the great and destructive conflict which ensuedwe cannot dwell. Nor can we pause to tease apart the shifting points at issuein the subsequent centuries of intermittent strife between empire and papacythat reached its peak in the mid-thirteenth century and was still able to gen-erate a pallid harmonic even in the fourteenth century, when pope andemperor alike had forfeited much of their former prestige and power.Instead, we must content ourselves with noting that the Gregorian reformersadvanced two claims, related at their inception but destined in their develop-ment for distinct and even countervailing careers.

First, they were moved bluntly to deny the age-old sacrality of kings, thevery presupposition, after all, for the extension of imperial and royal controlover the highest of ecclesiastical appointments. Second, they were led toclaim a crucial measure of jurisdictional superiority for pope over emperor, byso doing setting the papacy itself on the fateful path that was to lead, eventu-ally if ironically, to its own transformation into a form of sacral monarchy.

So far as the former of the two claims went, Gelasius’s denial more thanhalf a millennium earlier of the priestly character of emperors was now flour-ished anew, stripped moreover of the deference which with him had servedto soften its original impact. And his celebrated affirmation of the presence in“this world” of a dualism of ruling powers, spiritual and temporal (in itself arecognizable echo of the New Testament vision of things) was interpreted insuch a way as to attribute an ultimate superiority even in matters temporal tothe priesthood in general and the papacy in particular. “By virtue of the holi-ness of their conduct and the dignity of their ordo” the clergy were to be setapart from the laity and acknowledged to be superior to them.7 Emperorsand kings were no longer to be accorded the priestly attributes to which theyhad erroneously laid claim and Henry IV himself was to be recognized forwhat he truly was – “neither monk nor cleric; just a layman, nothing more.”No more, indeed, than any other layman, argued Cardinal Humbert, PopeNicholas II (1059–61) and, finally, Gregory VII himself, could an emperoror king “distribute ecclesiastical sacraments and episcopal or pastoral grace,that is to say crozier staffs and rings, with which all episcopal consecration isprincipally effected.” “A greater power,” said Gregory VII, is conferred upon

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

113

a lowly exorcist “when he is made spiritual emperor for the casting out ofdevils, than can be conferred upon any layman [however royal] for thepurpose of earthly dominion.” And no more than a swineherd who fails todischarge his duties, bluntly argued the Gregorian propagandist, Manegoldof Lautenbach, should a king who has broken “the bond of mutual fidelity”with his people by ruining and confounding “what he was established toorder correctly,” be kept in office.8 Hence the papal effort to reduce in sig-nificance the ceremony of anointing emperors, denying to it its oldsacramental status, separating it in the coronation ritual from the eucharisticservice, removing the clause a deo coronatus (“crowned by God”) from theaffiliated laudes or royal acclamations, portraying the pope rather than Godas the real source of imperial authority, and representing the papal unctionand coronation, therefore, as acts constitutive of that authority.9

With such theoretical negations and liturgical modifications the formalhistorical process whereby kingship was to be stripped of its sacral aura wasnow set in process. Promoted already by the political teachings embedded inthe New Testament texts themselves, but lost sight of in the centuries afterthe triumph of Christianity in the late Roman world, that process, despite theups and downs and twists and turns of subsequent history, was destinednever again to be completely derailed. Instead, it ground on into the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries when, having conspired to facilitate nothingless than the de facto demise of the institution of kingship itself, it finally metits term.

Thus far, these were a set of moves consistent enough with the New Testa-ment political vision and, in some measure, with St Augustine’s own negativetake on the status and reach of political authority even when wielded byrulers who were themselves Christian. Its relation, however, to the sort of“political Augustinianism” regnant in the earlier medieval centuries wassomewhat more complex and opened up the route that was eventually, and inthe second place, to transform the papacy itself into a species of sacral king-ship. By the term “political Augustinianism,” it will be recalled, it wasArquillière’s intention to denote an essentially theocratic pattern of thoughtthat tended to involve the absorption of the natural order into the supernat-ural, the profane laws of civil society into the sacred laws mediated by theecclesiastical order. In the earlier medieval centuries that had meant an eccle-siastical order subject to royal or imperial sway. For the Gregorian reformers,of course, that state of affairs was clearly out of the question. And yet theythemselves proved to be so immersed in the traditional understanding ofChristian society as a unitary one embracing the political as well as the reli-gious, that when Gregory VII read in the classic statements from the past –that of Pope Gelasius, for example – that the spiritual power was in some

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

114

fundamental way superior to the temporal, he instinctively took that to meanan explicitly hierarchical, jurisdictional superiority within a single, religio-political governmental order.

No longer was the Church seen as being in the empire. Instead, theempire was in some sense seen as being in the Church. Hence the revolution-ary Gregorian claims to the effect that “the priests of Christ are to beconsidered as fathers and masters of kings and princes and of all believers,”that the pope “may absolve subjects of unjust men from their fealty,” that“he may [even, indeed,] depose Emperors.”10 And by acting on that last(revolutionary) claim and twice deposing Henry IV, Gregory set themedieval popes on their quest for monarchical supremacy. Supremacy withinthe hierarchical ecclesiastical order itself, where, in contrast to the rest of thebishops whom they represented as “called only to a [limited] share of the[pastoral] responsibility [pars sollicitudinis],” they laid claim to a limitless“fullness of [jurisdictional] power [plenitudo potestatis].” And, beyond that,supremacy also in the temporal sphere and in the world at large.

Despite the many ups and downs the papacy has gone through during thesubsequent 900 years and more, the former claim to an essentially monarchi-cal supremacy within the universal Church it has stubbornly adhered to rightdown to the present. In his De regimine christiano (1301–2), sometimesdescribed as the oldest treatise on the Church, the papalist writer James ofViterbo, for example, treated the universal Church consistently as a kingdomwith the pope as its king. Five centuries later, Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821),variously described as “Praetorian of the Vatican” or literary colonel of thepapal Zouaves, was to do likewise. The sovereign pontiff he treated as thefixed Copernican point around which the whole vast cosmos of Christendomceaselessly revolved, and he pushed the same ecclesiastico-political regalismto its logic conclusion by assimilating infallibility to sovereignty and repre-senting it as an attribute of any power that was truly monarchical.11 Paul VI(1963–78), it is true, set to one side the papal crown and other conspicuoustrappings of papal royalty, but in 1983 the revised Code of Canon Law wasstill to describe the pope as sovereign pontiff, as “Vicar of Christ” possessed“by virtue of his office” of “supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinarypower in the Church which he is always able to exercise freely.”12

The second claim, however, which involved the possession of monarchicalsupremacy in the temporal as well as the spiritual realm and in the world atlarge, was fated to have a more checkered career. The notion, certainly, thatthe pope possessed a direct power to exercise that supremacy over temporalrulers was destined to forfeit its credibility during the century subsequent toInnocent IV’s politically driven deposition of the emperor Frederick II in1245. And if, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a revived papacy

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

115

was to assert an indirect power to intervene in matters temporal (wherebysubjects might lawfully depose princes whom the pope had excommunicatedor deprived of their office), by the eighteenth century that claim, too, hadceased to be taken seriously by the Christian world at large.

Nevertheless, during the period stretching from the late eleventh to theearly fourteenth century, the papal claim to a direct power in matters tempo-ral was articulated with ever increasing force. In the thirteenth century highpapalist canon lawyers like Hostiensis and Alanus Anglicus were particularlybold in their insistence on the derivation of the imperial power from thepapacy. Outside the Church, said the latter, “there is no empire.” And in thisthey were to be followed by Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) who in 1298,or so the chronicler tells us, received the ambassadors of Albert of Hapsburg,claimant to the imperial throne, in the following fashion:

Sitting on a throne, wearing on his head the diadem of Constantine, hisright hand on the hilt of the sword with which he was girt, he [the pope]cried out: “Am I not the supreme pontiff? Is this throne not the pulpit ofPeter? Is it not my duty to watch over the rights of the Empire? It is I whoam Caesar, it is I who am emperor.”13

It is true that his great predecessors Innocent III (1198–1216) and Inno-cent IV tended in their practical judgments to be a good deal moreresponsive to the nuance and complexity of the law, but even they appear tohave been advocates of what amounted to a papal theocracy. For Christ, or sothe latter said, being himself “true king and true priest after the order ofMelchisedech . . . [had] . . . established not only a pontifical but a royalmonarchy in the apostolic see, committing to Peter and his successorscontrol over both an earthly and a heavenly empire.”14

It would be improper to dismiss as “mere rhetoric” the language used inthat last statement. What it suggests is that while the Gregorian reformersand their successors had certainly intended to deprive of any sacred aura thekingship of the German emperors, we would be unwise to assume that theywere totally unresponsive themselves to the lure of the age-old notion ofsacral kingship itself. Had that pattern of thinking, indeed, not cast so verylong a shadow across their own ambitions for supremacy in Christian society,it would be hard to explain how the popes of the high Middle Ages permit-ted themselves to emerge as fully-fledged sacral monarchs in their own right.In that period they moved into center stage as the true (or most convincing)successors to the erstwhile Roman emperors, formally claiming many of theirattributes (that, for example, of being a lex animata or “living law,”),deploying some of their titles (“supreme pontiff,” “true emperor,” “celestial

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

116

emperor”), similarly costumed and possessed of the imperial regalia, greetedby comparably imperial acclamations, and ruling with imperial grandeur ahighly politicized Church via a centralized bureaucracy and in accordancewith a law modeled on (and creatively extended from) that of the Romanempire. We must content ourselves here with the evocation of only a few fea-tures illustrative of this new, papal version of sacral kingship – though, ifspace permitted, such illustrations could easily be multiplied.

Brooding about the ubiquity of sacral kingship and about the close paral-lel between royal and episcopal unction, A.M. Hocart was once moved toobserve that “the king and the priest are branches of the same stem.”15 Cer-tainly, so far as regalia, costume, and ceremonial went, in the mid-eighthcentury the forged Donation of Constantine took pains to depict the Bishopof Rome as entering into possession of the imperial regalia, namely, the redimperial cloak (or cappa rubea) with which popes were later to be formally“enmantled” at their investiture, the imperial diadem itself, and the Byzan-tine phrygium, or tall white hat, which was to evolve, on the one hand, intothe mitre worn eventually by all bishops, and, on the other (by the fourteenthcentury at least), into the triple crown (or Triregnum), worn as symbol oftheir sovereign power by all popes down to the 1960s. That (eighth-century)depiction may have been a little ahead of the actual ceremonial realities, butpopes were certainly crowned from the eleventh century onwards, and in thedocument known as the Dictatus papae (1075) it was bluntly stipulated thatthe pope alone might “use the imperial regalia.”16 Thus was launched theprocess which was to reach its culmination “in the thirteenth century, whenall the symbols of empire were to become attached to the papacy,” whenInnocent III could say that he wore the mitre as a sign of his pontifical posi-tion but the crown as a sign of his imperial power, and when popes like“Gregory IX and Boniface VIII . . . [were] . . . seen to be in every respectsuccessors of Constantine.”17

In the seventeenth century, when the ideological dust kicked up by cen-turies of intermittent strife between popes and emperors had begun finally tosettle, in a celebrated aside, the great English philosopher Thomas Hobbeswas to describe the papacy as “no other than the ghost of the deceasedRoman empire sitting crowned on the grave thereof.”18 It is now time toacknowledge that that observation was no less illuminating in its fundamen-tal perception for being derisive in it conscious intent.

The Fate of Imperial Sacrality

Only with the benefit of historical hindsight, however, can one perceive thatempire – or, at least, its Salian successor, the possessor still of a Frankish

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

117

as well as a Roman heritage – as already in the late eleventh century beingdestined for the grave. Denouncing as the “Hildebrandine madness” (Hilde-brandica insania) Gregory VII’s arrogation to the papacy of an ultimatejurisdictional superiority over temporal rulers and a concomitant right evento depose emperors, Henry IV fought back along two distinct ideologicalfronts, both of them destined to be vigorously defended right down to theultimate papal defeat of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in the late thirteenthcentury.

The first was explicitly dualistic in nature. It evoked Christ’s injunctionthat we should render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God thethings that are God’s, and, with it, Gelasius’s insistence that by that injunc-tion Christ had “distinguished between the offices of both powers accordingto their proper activities and separate dignities.” Henry accused Gregoryaccordingly of having “usurped for himself the kingship and the priesthood,”thereby holding “in contempt the pious ordination of God” which hadseparated them. The second front, at once more aggressive and more tradi-tional in nature, invoked the divinely ordained status of the imperial kingshipand the fact that the emperor had been “anointed to kingship among theanointed.”19

That the German emperors, confronted by the pontifical regalism ofGregory VII and his successors, should have opted to dig in along the linessuggested by their own interpretation of Gelasian dualism is not at all surpris-ing. It would be easy enough, indeed, to multiply instances of stubbornadhesion to that essentially defensive position in statements emanating fromsuch later emperors as Frederick Barbarossa (1152–90) or Frederick II(1212–50), from national kings like Philip IV of France (1285–1314), orfrom a host of later-medieval polemicists. In maintaining that stance theywere able to rely on the support, not only of the Civilians (commentators onthe Roman or “Civil” law), but also on some of the canon lawyers, too. Thus,among the latter, Huguccio of Pisa (fl. 1180–1210), commenting on the cel-ebrated Gelasian text which Gratian had included in his Decretum, endorseda form of moderate dualism, stating that “the office and rights of the emperorand pontiff were separated by Christ,” that neither power was “derived fromthe other,” that having existed prior to the papacy the empire could not drawits power from the latter, and that the emperor had both “the power of thesword and the imperial dignity [instead] from election by the princes andpeople.”20 The imprint of a similar type of dualistic caution is evident also inthe standard commentary (glossa ordinaria) to the Decretum written byJohannes Teutonicus (fl. 1210–45), of whom it has been said (though withspecific reference, admittedly, to Innocent III’s views on episcopal authority)that he “objected to Innocent’s ‘deification’ of the papal office.”21

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

118

More surprising, however, and on the second front, is the degree towhich, after an initial period of disarray, the traditional emphasis on imperialsacrality – extending sporadically even to the quasi-priestly status of theemperor – survived the Gregorian onslaught on the very notion of sacralkingship. It survived, admittedly, in somewhat attenuated form. But by themid-twelfth century, and despite clerical attempts to deny sacramental statusto the ceremony of royal anointing, a revived emphasis on sacrality was oncemore becoming evident. In 1152, declaring himself to hold the imperialoffice “from God alone through the election of the princes,” and seated inthe great church at Aachen on the throne of the (soon to be canonized)Charlemagne, the emperor Frederick I was crowned by the Archbishop ofMainz and “sacramentally anointed according to the ordinance of the Newand Old Testament.” The words are those of Otto of Freising, who goes onto insist that Frederick, no less than the bishop-elect of Münster who wasconsecrated in the same church on the following day, was rightly to be called“the anointed of Christ the Lord.” Sacramental lines were eventually to bedrawn in such a way as finally to exclude royal unction (once known as “thefifth sacrament”), but it remains the case that as late as 1530 Charles V, thelast of the emperors to be anointed (and following in this the example of hisimperial predecessors), was to robe and serve as a deacon at the pontificalmass which Pope Clement VII celebrated on the occasion of the imperialcoronation.22

It is hard to know quite what to make of such facts. By the end of thetwelfth century, and reflecting in this the importance of the revived study ofthe Roman law, the type of sacrality attaching to emperors had begun tolose its Christocentric-liturgical intonation and to take on a somewhatthinner, legally inspired coloration. If the emperor was no longer to becalled the “vicar of Christ” (the pope had now come to monopolize thattitle), under the influence of the old Roman legal vocabulary he was some-times referred to as a “god on earth” or “terrestrial god” and the empireitself came to be known as the sacrum imperium. Frederick I did not hesi-tate to proclaim himself to be “following the example” of such “divine[divi] predecessors as Constantine, Justinian and Theodosius,” and theHellenistic notion of the king as a “living law” was revived and applied tohim. As a result, the emperor came to be portrayed as something of a medi-atorial figure, a “priest of justice,” the very “Idea of Justice,” or the “Fatherand Son of Justice” – as Frederick II was described in 1231 in the LiberAugustalis, the collected constitutions of his Sicilian kingdom. Emphasiz-ing, then, that “after the Investiture Contest, the prince regained his priestlycharacter through the high pretensions of the Roman legal philosophy,”Ernst Kantorowicz not implausibly argued that in the thirteenth century

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

119

the “hallowing” or “sanctification of the secular state and its institutions”was in some measure to run parallel to the growing “imperialization of thepapacy.” Frederick II’s court was sometimes referred to as “the imperialchurch,” and in his person, certainly, the emperor was to become the focusof quasi-messianic hopes, as his subjects and supporters began to see in hima new Augustus, a new “savior,” a providential figure whose destiny itwould be to renew the world and “inaugurate the Golden Age.”23

In the Divine Comedy, at the start of the next century Dante, admittedly,was to consign Frederick II to hell – presumably because he understood himto have intruded his power into the spiritual domain. Yet Dante was nothimself immune to the providentialist thinking about the empire or theimperial messianism once prevalent among Frederick II’s own supporters.Noting in Hellenistic and early Christian fashion the parallelism betweenmonarchy and monotheism, and echoing the Lukan/Eusebian traditionaccording to which the coincidence of Christ’s incarnation with the Augus-tan peace was to be understood as nothing less than providential, he insistedthat it was God who was the immediate source of the emperor’s authority.God alone elects rulers. The imperial Electors, accordingly, “should not bear. . . [that] . . . title, but should [instead] be called heralds of the divine provi-dence.” In the euphoria which, in 1311, greeted the descent of the emperorHenry VII (d. 1313) into Italy, Dante was moved, therefore, not only toentitle him as “King of the earth, and minister of God” or “by Divine Provi-dence King of the Romans and ever Augustus,” but even to depict him inmessianic guise: “Then my spirit rejoiced within me when I said secretlywithin myself: ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of theworld.’”24

Of course, by the time Dante wrote those extraordinary words, the politi-cal realities of the day had conspired to ensure that the universalist idealwhich he was extending himself to honor was doomed to remain incapable ofpolitical realization. Frederick II’s disastrous conflict with the papacy alongwith the subsequent extermination of his Hohenstaufen successors ended thepossibility of clothing the dream of universal empire with any truly viableinstitutional form. The future was to lie, instead, with forces antipathetic tothe very idea of universalism. It was to lie, in effect, with the national king-doms which were now beginning to step out from under the imperialshadow. And those kingdoms, until they themselves entered in the fifteenthcentury upon their own time of troubles, were destined for a while to takecenter stage.

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

120

Kingship in France and England

As early as the ninth century, taking their cue from Luke 22:38, with its mys-terious reference to two swords, papal letters had assumed the text in classicfashion to be referring to “the material sword of secular coercion and thespiritual sword of excommunication.” At that time the image was invoked topropose the harmonious ideal of cooperation between the two powers.25 Inthe eleventh century, however, the Gregorian reformers had called that idealinto question – or, at least, they had peremptorily changed the ground rulesunder which such cooperation could take place. In the twelfth century,moreover, St Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) had lent the weight of his for-midable authority to the papalist or “hierocratic” interpretation of thatclassic ideal, whereby “both swords, spiritual and material . . . belong to thechurch: the one by the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of thesoldier, but clearly at the bidding of the priest [ad nutum sacerdotis]”. By thethirteenth century, that hierocratic interpretation, much debated in thecanonist commentaries, had succeeded in entrenching itself in the theologyfaculties at Oxford and Paris. Early on in the scholastic era, indeed, RobertGrosseteste, the great Bishop of Lincoln (d. 1253), had given it not untypicalexpression when, acknowledging that Christ himself had “commanded thedivision of the functions of each of the two swords and of the two lawsbetween temporal and ecclesiastical rulers,” he went on to insist that Christhad done so “with the oneness of each sword and each law retained [none-theless] in the charge of the rulers of the church.”26

Such hierocratic pretensions, however, which the French baronage dis-missed as “outrageous novelties,” the French and English monarchs and thelegal traditions of their respective kingdoms proved robust enough to keep atbay. As a result, they were able to vindicate in practice the autonomy of thecrown within the territorial boundaries of their respective kingdoms and itsright to determine, in any given legal case, whether or not jurisdiction shouldbe conceded to the ecclesiastical courts. Great moments of crisis thereundoubtedly were – in the case of England the clashes between Henry II andArchbishop Thomas à Becket in the twelfth century, and between King Johnand Pope Innocent III in the thirteenth; in the case of France, that betweenPhilip IV and Boniface VIII in the early fourteenth. But such moments ofoutright, protracted confrontation were the exception rather than the rule.So far as the ongoing relationship between the two powers went, the norm inboth kingdoms turned out to be a form of dualism tilted in favor of the tem-poral, what one historian has aptly characterized as “cooperative dualism atthe king’s command.”27

Unlike the German emperors, moreover, the kings in question, French

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

121

and English, were by the fourteenth century well established, hereditaryrulers of discrete national territories whose forebears (unlike those of theGerman emperors) had not had to bear the full brunt of the Gregorian attackon the old tradition of pontifical kingship and all that it had entailed. Theyretained, as a result, despite the papal effort to deny sacramental status to theceremony of royal anointing, a recognizably sacred aura. The curative powerswhich clerics and populace alike believed them to be exercising when theytouched those suffering from scrofula (known, significantly enough in bothcountries, as “the King’s Evil”/“le mal du roi”), were but one dramaticand continuing manifestation of their sacral status. In France Charles V(1364–80), of whom his court writers employed the most exalted language,promoted that status quite self-consciously. He was at pains to assemble agreat collection of books on matters governmental in general and on monar-chy and its sacral dimension in particular. Notable among them was theTraité du sacre of Jean Golein, a tract which focused on the anointing of theking with a sacred balm believed to have been delivered from heaven duringthe baptism of Clovis, the first of the Merovingian kings. Golein viewed theroyal unction as witnessing to the fact that the king’s authority derived fromGod. It was not only the source of his curative powers. It also functioned insuch a way as to “cleanse” (nettoie) him from his sins and to transform himinto some sort of priestly figure. That priestly status, certainly, is very muchon display in the program of miniatures preserved in the Coronation Book ofCharles V which provides, in effect, a visual record of that king’s coronationin 1364. And Charles V’s own sincere adhesion to such views is reflected inthe fact that he was to wear “a cap throughout his life to preserve the [traceof] oil received at his coronation from any earthly contact.”28

In his De officio regis, written in England at around the same time, JohnWycliffe (d. 1384) asserted that the king was the Vicar of God in matterstemporal and, as such was owed almost unlimited obedience. He arguedfurther (like Jan Hus in Bohemia) that the king, reflecting the divinity ofChrist, was superior in dignity to the priest who reflected only Christ’shumanity. In so doing, he was echoing the high regalist point of view embed-ded in what we have called the Ambrosiaster tradition, in the form impartedto it by the Anglo-Norman Anonymous three centuries earlier. And althoughthere is no evidence to suggest that Richard II (1377–99) himself drew onWycliffite ideas, that ill-fated king seems to have firmly believed in thedivinely conferred nature of his royal office, in the unquestioning obedienceowed thereby to him, and in his freedom from those constitutional restraintson the exercise of royal power that Englishmen over the centuries had cometo view as customary. Hereditary succession and royal unction (which heclearly viewed as a sacrament) witnessed in his view to his divine right to rule.

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

122

The moving speech which Shakespeare puts in his mouth does indeed conveyRichard’s sincere conviction that

Not all the water in the rough rude seaCan wash the balm from an anointed king;The breath of worldly men cannot deposeThe deputy elected by the lord.

(Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2, ll. 54–7)

Until his death, then, and despite his deposition in 1399, he continued toview himself, by virtue of his anointment, as the true king of England.

Historians have sometimes been disposed to speak of his deposition as“the revolution of 1399.” While that almost certainly exaggerates the dim-ensions of the change involved in the substitution of Lancastrian for Planta-genet, it remains the case that the better part of the century ensuing didconstitute a period of crisis for the English monarchy – and, in fact, for mostof the monarchies of Europe. The kingdoms of Portugal and Poland provedto be exceptions to the rule, but kingdoms elsewhere fell into disarray andkingship itself was thrown on the defensive, and for a variety of reasons spe-cific to the individual kingdoms. Disputed succession, dynastic upheaval, fac-tional and religious strife, outright civil war – all played their role. So, too,did the devastating impact of war between nations and rulers: in the east, theremorseless pressure of the Ottoman conqueror; in the west, the destructivecontinuation of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France.

Nor, in the international arena, did the Church itself prove to be immuneto the disarray characteristic of this time of troubles. The Great Schism of thewest, which for 40 long years had seen, first two, and then three rival lines ofclaimants compete scandalously for the papal throne, was brought to a defini-tive end in 1418 with the election of Martin V. But so far as the sweepingclaims of the papal monarchy were concerned, that happy outcome had beenbought at great price. Where diplomacy, attempts at arbitration, resort, even,to armed coercion had all failed to end the schism, it was left to a generalcouncil assembled at Constance (1414–18), the greatest of all medieval repre-sentative assemblies, to achieve that goal. And it did so only after embracing insolemn legislation the constitutionalist claim that the general council, in virtueof the fact that it represented the universal Church and wielded the divinelyconferred authority that resided ultimately in the entire body of the faithful,possessed a jurisdictional or governmental power superior in certain criticalcases to that of the pope alone. By means of that power it could impose consti-tutional restraints on the pope and could, if need be, go so far as to try, judge,punish, and even depose a recalcitrant papal incumbent.

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

123

All of those things were in fact done at the Council of Constance, and thepressure on the papacy was continued at the subsequent Council of Basel(1431–49). The essentially constitutionalist challenge which the “concil-iarists” at the latter council handed down to Pope Eugenius IV (1431–47)was itself grounded in natural-law assumptions about the ultimate authorityresiding in political communities, assumptions which had a broad resonancefor the late medieval political world at large. Recognizing that fact, andanxious now to marshal support among the kings and princes of Europe,Eugenius IV and his partisans bracketed for the time being the old papal pre-tensions to some sort of jurisdictional superiority even in matters temporal.Instead, they cast the papacy in more “user-friendly” guise as the belea-guered champion of the monarchical principle itself, which they portrayednow, in its temporal or secular no less than its papal or spiritual form, as beingunder radical attack at the hands of the allegedly “populist” conciliarists whohad seized control of the proceedings at the Council of Basel. If we can takeat face value the testimony of the Venetian, Pier da Monte, a staunchlymonarchist papal diplomat, the Eugenian claim that Basel did indeed pose athreat to “every kingdom, every province and region, all cities and peoples –the whole world” found responsive echoes in European political circles –even, for example, at the court of Henry VI of England.29 In the war of pro-paganda and diplomatic campaign that ensued, the papalists were ultimatelyto meet with some success, winning over the key temporal rulers, deprivingthe conciliarists as a result of the political support on which they depended,and putting an end (at least in immediate practical terms) to the conciliarattempt to hem in the glittering papal monarchy with fustian constitutionalrestraint.

It is true that the conciliarist writers, building notably on the corporatistideas of the canon lawyers, had brought a heightened measure of theoreticalprecision to the traditional and essentially practical medieval preoccupationwith the role in community and political matters of representation andconsent. They had produced (and, during the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies continued to add to) an enormous body of constitutionalist argu-mentation that served to reinforce in the world of “secular” politics thewidespread late medieval sense that the people as a whole, or the “estates”representing them, retained by natural law an ultimate authority over errantmonarchs. That conciliarist literature was not to be forgotten in the follow-ing centuries. It was destined in the sixteenth century to be exploited byCalvinist advocates of a right of resistance to persecuting or tyrannous rulers,in the seventeenth century by parliamentarian and/or Puritan opponents inEngland of Charles I’s “absolutist” policies, and in eighteenth-centuryFrance by those “judicial Jansenists” and “patriot constitutionalists” who

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

124

found themselves in opposition to royal policies and who were moved tomake an oppositional case subordinating the authority of the king to that ofthe nation as a whole.30 That notwithstanding, it remains the case that for acentury and more after the papal defeat of the conciliarists at Basel, the tidewas to flow strongly in favor of the monarchs of Europe, temporal no lessthan papal.

Out of the fifteenth-century cauldron of conflict and chaos emergedforms of kingship that were more reliably financed, more adequately institu-tionalized, less subject to limitation by the (decaying) parliaments andrepresentative assemblies of the era, and more prone to confidently advanc-ing quasi-absolutist claims for the reach of their prerogatives. That, certainly,was to be true of the popes in the era of papal “restoration” after Basel. Inthat era they emerged once more, in theory no less than practice, as mon-archs of a distinctly absolutist stamp, despite the limitations of their role asItalian princes, for that, as temporal rulers, was what they had now become.They began, accordingly, to frame their monarchical claims to rulership overthe universal Church in such a way as to assert their uniqueness. And theyrejected, thereby, the classic conciliarist claim that the Church, being a politybasically akin to polities in general, retained by natural law a residual right toprevent its own ruin even to the point of deposing its ruler. Stressing at thestart of the sixteenth century the uniquely divine grounding of papal monar-chical power, Cardinal Cajetan insisted that to argue thus in essentiallyconciliarist fashion was totally unacceptable in that it “perverted” theChurch’s basic constitutional order, turning it into a democratic or popularone in which all authority resides with the whole community rather than withany single person. One must recognize instead, or so Cardinal Bellarmineadded a century later, that given the uniquely supernatural grounding ofecclesiastical power, analogies drawn from the profane world of secular poli-tics are altogether irrelevant. “The Holy Church,” he wrote in 1606, arguingagainst the Venetian theologian Paolo Sarpi, “is not like the Republic ofVenice which can be said to be . . . above the prince.” “Nor is it like a worldlykingdom,” where the power of the monarch is derived ultimately from thepeople. Instead, it is “a most perfect kingdom and an absolute monarchy,which depends not on the people . . . but on the divine will alone.”31

This was a quintessential formulation, and Bellarmine was to emerge as thedoughty defender, not simply of the pope’s absolute monarchy within thechurch itself, but also of a renewed assertion of an indirect papal power in tem-poral affairs. Nor was this simply a matter of toothless theory, for in 1570Pope Pius V had exercised that indirect power in classic fashion when, in thebull Regnans in excelsis, he excommunicated and declared deposed QueenElizabeth I of England. The threat that such claims to a papal power, however

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

125

indirect, over matters temporal posed to the established kingdoms and princi-palities of Europe constitutes one of the two principal circumstances settingthe stage for the flowering of the last great body of Christian theorizingarguing for the sacred character of kingship, last, that is, in a series that wehave seen stretching back for more than a millennium to what we have called“the Eusebian accommodation” with pre-Christian notions of sacral monar-chy. And that last great body of Christian regal theory, essentially archaizing innature though occasionally portrayed as something of a novelty, is what histo-rians of political thought have traditionally characterized as the theory of the“Divine Right of Kings.”

The second principal circumstance setting the stage for the emergence ofthat body of theory is of very different provenance. It reflects the failure noless than the success enjoyed by the Lutheran and Calvinist reformers inpropagating their beliefs across Europe. The initial impact of the ProtestantReformation, with the almost obsessive insistence of the magisterial reform-ers on St Paul’s classic teaching (Romans 13:1–7) on obedience for con-science’ sake to the ruling powers, had been to buttress the status and powerof kings and princes. That was certainly true of the German states and of theScandinavian realms of the Lutheran diaspora. It was no less true of England,where the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) asserted Henry VIII’s govern-mental or jurisdictional omnicompetence within the territorial boundaries ofhis “realm of England,” thereby rejecting any papal claim to exercise jurisdic-tion within that realm. Arrogated to the crown, as a result, was the entirefullness of jurisdictional power in the external or public forum that the popehad previously wielded over the church in England. And any spiritual author-ity possessed by the English priestly hierarchy independently of the crownwas henceforth redefined in such a way as to limit it, in effect, to the sacra-mental realm (potestas ordinis).32

Small wonder, then, that in 1535 a royal propagandist like Stephen Gar-diner, evoking the example of the Old Testament kings and of emperors likeJustinian (and with the words “Forsothe, a blynde distinction and [one] fullof darkenesse”), could sweep aside the distinction between the Church’sspiritual and the prince’s temporal government that had formed the veryfoundation of the typically medieval ecclesiologies and political theories. Inso doing, he did not refrain from reminding his readers that the scripturesdescribed the king as “God’s lieftenaunt,” “as it were the ymage of Godupon earthe,” upon the subject’s obedience to whom they impose also nolimits. Small wonder, too, that Richard Taverner, another Henrician apolo-gist, noting that kings “represent to us the parson even of god himself,”should assert in 1539 that God “adourneth them whythe the knowable titleof his own name callying them Goddes.” And thus, following what we have

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

126

seen earlier to have been a well trodden route from royal theocracy to royalChristology, another author was even moved to refer to King Henry as “theSon of Man.”33

But if the Reformation did indeed work initially and directly to bolster thedignity and power of kings and to emphasize the religious duty of their sub-jects passively to obey their commands, it ended by undercutting indirectlythat dignity, status, and power. It did so because, by a combination of failureand success, it had the effect of creating religious minorities right acrossEurope: Calvinist minorities where it failed to carry the day (initially inScotland, permanently in France); Catholic (in parts of Germany but quin-tessentially in England) where it met with greater success. Catholics no lessthan Calvinists, confronted as they now were with persecuting rulers whomthey could only view as heretics, were finally to relinquish any sympathy withnotions of passive obedience. Instead, they were led to develop (often intandem) forms of resistance theory grounded in a reappropriation and even-tual radicalization of the commonplace late medieval insistence that thepower of kings and princes stemmed ultimately from community consentand that the community as a whole retained by natural law a residual powerwhich it could wield to curb tyranny and prevent its own ruin.

The continuity with such medieval constitutionalist views is dramaticallyevident in the writings of such sixteenth-century Protestant resistance tractsas John Ponet’s Shorte Treatise of Politicke Power (1556) in England, GeorgeBuchanan’s De jure regni apud Scotos (1567) in Scotland, and the HuguenotVindiciae contra tyrannos (1579) in France. It is evident also in many anEnglish parliamentarian and/or Puritan tract written in the next century byway of opposition to the claims of the royalists. Here the degree of familiaritywith the precedent of conciliarist constitutionalism and, in many cases, thewillingness to cite the works of such fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scholas-tic thinkers as Pierre Ailly, Jean Gerson, John Mair, and Jacques Almain isreally quite striking.34 Aligned as they were with the papal cause, the sup-porters of the Catholic League during the French Religious Wars of the latesixteenth century, and the Jesuit opponents of the Elizabethan and Jacobeanreligious settlement in England, were understandably more reticent aboutacknowledging any such theoretical debts. But in their tracts the same intel-lectual affinities are evident and, in that respect at least, King James I wasvery much on target when he dubbed Jesuits as being “nothing other thanPuritan-papists.” James, of course, was a leading advocate of the theory ofthe divine right of kings. His words may serve to remind us that that theorycame to the fore in late sixteenth-century France and England in the contextof two interrelated contemporary developments, first, the revived papal claimto possess an indirect power in matters temporal and second, the alarming

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

127

circulation in both Catholic and Calvinist circles of arguments affirming theultimately popular origins of political authority and the retention of a con-comitant right by the community as a whole to resist, even by force, anheretical or tyrannous monarch, Catholic no less than Protestant.

The Divine Right of Kings

Almost a century ago now, in a classic formulation, John Neville Figgisencapsulated what he called “the completest form” of divine right theory infour succinct propositions. First, that the institution of kingship is divinelyordained. Second, that to God alone are kings held to be accountable. Third,that on pain of eternal punishment God enjoins on subjects the twin dutiesof passive obedience and non-resistance. Fourth, that the hereditary right ofsuccession to the throne stemming from birth into the legitimate royal line isunder no circumstances subject to forfeiture. As a right, that is to say, hered-ity regulated by primogeniture is “indefeasible.”35

The formulation is a helpful one, though it should be added that of thefour propositions the two first were the more ancient, with roots well engagedin the rich soil of medieval imperial and regal ideology. The latter two were ofmore recent provenance. The solemn emphasis on passive obedience and non-resistance would have seemed odd to most medievals. It reflected, in fact, therevolutionary changes introduced by the Reformation, both the obsessiveemphasis of the magisterial reformers on Romans 13:1–7, and the subsequentshattering of the religious unity of Christendom, the emergence, accordingly,of dissident religious minorities, and the concomitant threat to public orderand political stability which the long-drawn-out agony of the French ReligiousWars had brought home so devastatingly in the closing decades of the six-teenth century. Similarly, the stress on indefeasible hereditary right reflectedthe dynastic turbulence of the century and more preceding. It was in virtue,after all, of their royal birthright alone that Henry IV of France and James I ofEngland had come to occupy their respective thrones – the former despite hisunacceptable religious allegiance, the latter in the teeth of two acts of parlia-ment formally excluding the Stuart succession.

While, in Figgis’s “complete” form, divine-right theory began to rise toprominence in the closing years of the sixteenth century and the early yearsof the seventeenth, it was to enjoy its heyday in England probably only in theera of the Restoration, after the trauma and uncertainties of civil war andinterregnum (1642–60), and in France, after the turbulence of the Fronde(1648–53), an uprising of nobility directed against the royal governmentthen presided over by the regent, Cardinal Mazarin. The theory itself was notlacking in variation and complexity. Sir Robert Filmer’s celebrated “patriar-

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

128

chal” understanding of kingship, for example, in which kings were to beviewed as (or, at least, as if they were) rightful successors to the type of patri-archal authority exercised over his children by Adam, the first father,represents a very important, if distinct and subsidiary, strand in divine-rightthinking, though one evident already in the De imperandi authoritate etChristiana obedientia (1593) of the Elizabethan divine, Hadrian Saravia. Butprescinding here from such variations, we will content ourselves with twobrief illustrations of the theory. The first is drawn from several writings ofJames VI of Scotland/James I of England and dates to the turn of the six-teenth/seventeenth centuries. The second is taken from the pertinentsections of the Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte written bythe great French churchman Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (later bishop ofMeaux) during the 1670s when he was serving as tutor to the dauphin.

Although the Trew Law of Free Monarchies which James wrote in 1598 asKing of Scotland, with its blunt denial of any right of resistance against a kingwho is “heritable overlord,” represents the most complete statement of hisdivine-right views, his notorious Speech to the Lords and Commons of the Par-liament at White-Hall (1610) is adequately representative of those views andhas the added advantage of being no less helpfully succinct than forcefullycompelling. The context in which the king was speaking was one set by theunhappy conjunction between a royal request for additional and substantialfinancial supply and an outburst of parliamentary irritation over the extrava-gant claims which Dr John Cowell, professor of civil law at Cambridge, hadmade in a recently published book concerning the reach of the royal prerog-ative. It was a context to which the king seems to have been less sensitivethan he might have been.

Having warmed up his audience with an outline of the topics he intendedto address, James launched into his discourse with the following words. “Thestate of MONARCHIE,” he said,

is the supremest thing on earth. For Kings are not only GODS Lieu-tenants upon earth, and sit upon GODS throne, but even by GODhimselfe they are called Gods.

And if they “are justly called Gods,” it is because “they exercise a manner orresemblance of Divine power upon earth.” For just as “God hath power tocreate, or destroy, make, or unmake at his pleasure, to give life, or senddeath, to judge all and to be judged nor accomptable to none,” so, too, dokings. “[A]ccomptable to none but God onely,” they have the power to“make and unmake their subjects,” to “exalt low things, and abase highthings, and make of their subjects like men at the Chesse.”

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

129

These were hardly sentiments designed to warm the hearts of the restiveparliamentarians, many of them practitioners at the common law; nor canJames’s (doubtless well-meaning) attempt to assuage their worries have beenof much help. For it involved the invocation, not only of further general cor-respondences between king and God, but also, in particular, the applicationto the royal power of the old scholastic distinction between the absolute andordained (or ordinary) power of God (potentia absoluta et ordinata seu ordi-naria) which the canonist Hostiensis had borrowed from the theologiansover two centuries earlier in order to elucidate the ineffable reach of papalpower. So that if “it is Atheism and blasphemie to dispute what God can do[de potentia absoluta]: good Christians content themselves with his willrevealed in his word [potentia ordinaria].” Similarly, while “the mysticall rev-erence, that belongs unto them that sit in the Throne of God” entails thatthe “absolute Prerogative of the Crowne is not lawfully to be disputed,” thatis not the case when it comes to his ordinary power, that is “the Kingsrevealed will in his Law.”36

James’s discourse was learned enough, certainly, as also was that of BishopBossuet a half-century and more later. If the learning of which Bossuet dis-posed was less scholastic and more self-consciously biblical and patristic innature, and the tone of his work (much of it written for the instruction of thedauphin) more relentlessly didactic even than that of James I, neverthelessthe basic stance he adopts towards the institution of kingship is not dissimi-lar. His point of departure is the insistence that “there was never a finer stateconstitution than that under which” the subjects of the Old Testament kingslived, and no finer exemplars of monarchy than David and Solomon them-selves (1–2).37 For “royalty has its origin in divinity itself” (58). “It is Godwho makes kings and who establishes reigning houses”; “the royal throne isnot the throne of a man” but nothing less than “the throne of God” (244).

Royal judgments, then, are to be “attributed to God himself.” No coer-cive force runs against kings, nor do they have to account to any but Godhimself for what in the height of their majesty they choose to do (82–3; 162).That majesty is to be recognized for what it truly is: “the image and greatnessof God in a prince.” Just as “the power of God can be felt in a moment fromone end of the world to the other,” so, too, “the royal power acts simultane-ously throughout the kingdom,” holding “the whole kingdom in positionjust as God holds the whole world.” And just as the world, were God to with-draw his providential hand, would lapse back into the nothingness fromwhich he had drawn it, so, too, were the royal authority to be withdrawn,would the kingdom itself lapse into its own primordial chaos (160). If, then,there is “something religious in the respect one gives to the prince,” it isproperly so. For God has, indeed, “put something divine” into kings. To

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

130

them, says the psalmist (Psalm 81:6), “[y]ou are Gods, and all of you the sonsof the most High” (60). Everywhere kings are “called Christs or the Lord’sanointed.” “Under this venerable name the prophets themselves reveredthem, and viewed them as associates in the sovereign empire of God, whoseauthority” it is, after all, that they exercise “over the people” (58).

Regal divinity, it seems, was as alive in the France of the 1670s as it hadbeen in England at the start of the century. Alive, it may be, but not necessar-ily all that well. In hindsight it is clear that the days of that sort of thinkingwere already numbered, and that the storm clouds, so far as the institution ofkingship was concerned, were now beginning to gather. And perhaps notonly in hindsight. Scattered straws in the wind signaling the disasters that layahead were already beginning to appear. If the resistance theories spawned bythe persecution of Protestant and Catholic minorities alike were by no meansrepublican in inspiration, considerable significance attaches nonetheless tothe degree to which they insisted on the role of the popular will in the institu-tion of kingship, as well as to their conviction that in the people still residedthe power to curb the tyrannical abuse of the royal office. Similarly significantwas the degree to which the author of the Vindiciae contra tyrannos (in this,certainly, unlike Bossuet later on) resonated to the ambivalence toward thevery institution of monarchy evident in the Book of Samuel’s discussion ofthe institution of the Israelite kingships, the sense there conveyed, indeed,that God himself felt rejected when the Israelites expressed their wish to havea king “like all the nations.”38 Even more significant were the events on theground. The successive assassinations by Catholic fanatics of Henry III andHenry IV of France had ushered in an era in which the sacrosanctity of kingscould no longer be taken for granted, an era which, in mid-century, was to beshaken to its very foundations by the trial, condemnation, and execution ofCharles I and the subsequent attempt to terminate the English monarchyaltogether.

Towards the end of the Preface to his Philosophy of Right, and reflecting(famously) on the business of “giving instruction as to what the world oughtto be,” the German philosopher Hegel was later to concede that “philosophy. . . always comes on the scene too late to give” such instruction. “When phil-osophy paints its grey in grey,” he added, “then has a shape of life grown old.The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”39

Something similar, I would suggest, may properly be said about the body ofthought we know as the divine-right theory of kingship. When finally it cameto flower in seventeenth-century Europe, the shadows were already begin-ning to lengthen for the age-old institution to which it accorded so very loftya status.

The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

131

Change being the very lifeblood of the historical endeavor, it would be churl-ish for any historian to complain about it. But the long, twilight struggle toidentify, chart, and assess the enduring processes that have driven millennialchange can still be, if not the stuff of nightmare, at least the trigger of insom-nia. To recognize in the ancient and ubiquitous pattern of sacral kingship apolitics of enchantment is, I believe, unexceptionable enough. Nor, at leastsince Max Weber’s great studies in comparative, historical sociology, shouldthe identification of a religious source – Old Testament Yahwism and NewTestament Christianity, perhaps especially in its Calvinist variant – as the well-spring of the “disenchantment of the world” be the occasion of muchsurprise. To disentangle, however, across the long centuries of largely unwit-ting compromise, the intricate and intermittent working of the factors thatgradually destabilized the archaic way of comprehending what we (instinc-tively if anachronistically) categorize as the political is another storyaltogether. The more so if one is called upon somehow to convey in briefcompass at least an approximate sense of what actually happened. And that,alas, in this brief essay in interpretation, is our unforgiving fate.

What, then, can be said that can at least claim to be, on balance, less mis-leading than illuminating? Two basic claims, I believe, neither of themaltogether counter-intuitive. First, that so far, at least, as the institution ofkingship in Europe is concerned, the period stretching from the seventeenthcentury to the nineteenth was, indeed, one of marked, and in some measure,cumulative desacralization. If here I risk belaboring the obvious, it is becausewe cannot simply ignore the fact that those centuries were also punctuatedby flickers of resacralization – France at the start of Louis XVI’s reign in1774,1 for example, or England in the closing years of the nineteenthcentury. The latter, however, as David Cannadine has insisted, involved a

6The Fading Nimbus

Modern Kingship and its Fate in aDisenchanted World

132

rather self-conscious effort by court “liturgists” and publicists that, by themid-twentieth century, had met with such success that some commentatorswere moved, in the wake of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, to complainabout a worrying overemphasis on the sacred dimension of the royal officeand about the unfortunate degree to which the Queen had “continued toappear more sacerdotal than secular.”2 Second, that the marked accelerationin the process of desacralization occurring in the modern centuries is notsimply to be taken for granted as a matter of “commonsense.” It is, after all,without historical precedent, and it has ended by delegitimating the veryinstitution of monarchy itself. Nor will we be able fully to comprehend itunless we are willing to push back beyond such obvious and salient featuresof modernity as the collapse of religious unity, the concomitant pluralizationof “life-worlds” and the strain on plausibility that goes with it, the markedlysecularizing thrust of scientific reason and technological progress, the institu-tionally demystifying impact of commercial, industrial, and bureaucraticrationalization, and, in particular, the impersonal governmental routines andthis-worldly disciplines of what is sometimes called “the rational state.”Instead, we must probe deeper and seek the ultimate wellsprings of change inthe complex intersection in the late medieval and early modern world of anarray of long-term developments, the most fundamental among them stem-ming from the destabilizing novelty of the Hebraic religious vision itself. Tothose two fundamental claims, we must now in sequence turn.

The De-mystification of the European Monarchyand the Crisis of Legitimacy

When, in the late 1860s, Walter Bagehot sat down to write his celebratedessay on The English Constitution and came to address the role of themonarchy, he identified it as “the solitary transcendent element” in thatconstitution. In earlier times, indeed, and in comparison with “the parlia-ment, the law, the press” – human institutions all – it had been viewed asnothing less than “a Divine institution.” Even now, the hostility of time andthe erosion of religious loyalties notwithstanding, the monarchy still“strengthens our government with the strength of religion,” and by “itsreligious sanction” still “confirms all our political order.”3 In 1953, almost acentury later, the coronation of Elizabeth II took place. It was the first suchevent to be mediated by television to the world at large. Contemplating itstone, one might easily be tempted to detect in it a measure of deference toBagehot’s sentiments, did not the liturgy involved correspond so closely(despite subsequent accretions) to the oldest of the coronation rites forAnglo-Saxon kings of which we have a complete record – namely the Edgar

The Fading Nimbus

133

ordo of 973, from which, as we have seen, the Anglo-Norman Anonymousin the late eleventh century drew so much of his inspiration. It was linkedclosely with a eucharistic service and involved not only the actual corona-tion of the monarch but also, before that and more centrally, her anointingby the Archbishop of Canterbury and subsequent vesting in the distinctivelysacerdotal garb of alb, dalmatic, and stole – all in a manner evocative of theconsecration of a bishop. In a subsequent and celebrated article, the sociol-ogists Edward Shils and Michael Young succeeded in raising a few academiceyebrows by declaring that “the monarchy has its roots in man’s beliefsand sentiments about what he regards as sacred,” and that the coronationceremony “provided at one time and for practically the entire society suchan intensive contact with the sacred that we believe we are justified in inter-preting it . . . as a great act of national communion.”4 As such, we haveseen, it was later to draw negative commentary from critics opposed tothe “sacerdotalization” of the monarchy. But it was also to be commendedas an “act of sacralisation” by more recent British commentators who havecome to the unexpected conclusion that the monarchy is “an essentiallysacred institution,” have criticized, accordingly, the currently fashionableadvocacy of secularizing reform, and have urged, instead, the wisdom of“resacralization.”5

The current debate about the future of the British monarchy has beenpunctuated unhelpfully by the familial scandals and elephantine gaffes towhich the Windsors have of late fallen prone. It is destined, accordingly, tobe played out in the harsh glare of media attention. But whatever itsoutcome, we would be well advised not to lose sight of the fact that the senti-ments Bagehot expressed about the monarchy in 1867 were in many waysprescriptive rather than descriptive. What he wrote, that is to say, was far frombeing valid as a depiction of the state of the monarchy at that specific time –or indeed, as he himself obliquely suggested, of its state at any time since theaccession of George I in 1714. “During the whole reigns of George I andGeorge II,” he noted, “the sentiment of religious loyalty altogether ceased tosupport the Crown.”6 If it began to make something of a comeback duringthe trials and tribulations of George III’s reign, the process of recovery wasto prove slow and halting. That king’s royal successors, George IV andWilliam IV, the former womanizing and extravagant, the latter ignorant andprejudiced, were to do much to discredit the monarchy. Nor did Queen Vic-toria, however upright she was in her personal life, emerge as anything thatcould be called a popular figure. In her early years the butt of ribald cartoon-ists, in her middle years she came to be the target of editorial criticism in thepages of a press that wavered between lack of sympathy and outright hostil-ity. And to “this dowdy and unpopular crown,” the inept and slapdash way in

The Fading Nimbus

134

which the various royal ceremonies and rituals were performed did nothingat all to add any luster. “For the majority of the great royal pageants stagedduring the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century oscillated betweenfarce and fiasco.”7

All of that was to change, of course, in the last quarter of the century andthe years running up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. That was aperiod marked right across Europe (and in Japan, too) by the invention,“mass production,” and refining of a good deal of ceremonial tradition. Butso far as royal ceremonial went, while it doubtless succeeded (and not only inEngland) in evoking a pleasing sense of imperial grandeur and regal mystery,it did so via a novel and highly self-conscious exploitation of the royal orimperial person with the object of manipulating mass psychology. This wasnovel – “unlike traditional [and more court-oriented] royal ceremonialsdesigned to symbolize the rulers’ relation to the divinity” – in that it was inlarge measure “directed at the public,” at the masses of subjects with whomeven the most autocratic of rulers now felt called upon, if they wished to

The Fading Nimbus

135

Figure 7 Great Britain. The Archbishop of Canterbury crowning Queen Elizabeth II,June, 1953. (TopFoto)

retain their thrones, to establish some sort of direct relationship.8 That wasquintessentially true of the great imperial assemblage and subsequentdurbars which successive viceroys and governors-general of India mountedin 1877, 1903, and 1911. At the last of those extraordinary assemblies,indeed, George V made what can only be described as an imperial epiphanywhen he crowned himself before a vast assemblage as Emperor of India.

For English people, of course, at least since the death of Queen Anne in1714, the function of royal ritual could scarcely have been other than public-oriented. Or, more accurately, the meaning attaching to it could no longerbe that which had still attached to it during the Stuart heyday of divine righttheory and revived regal sacrality. Charles II had made a point of exercisinghis curative powers by touching for scrofula no fewer than 20,000 times inhis first four years as king. Queen Anne, however, was to be the last Englishmonarch to do so (memorably, at least, in the case of Dr Johnson), and theCardinal of York, last of the Stuart pretenders, appears also to have been thelast (in 1802) to work that particular piece of royal magic. After the greatupheaval of 1688 and the abrogation, with James II’s flight and the accessionof William III, of the fundamental divine-right principle of indefeasiblehereditary succession, the leading Anglican prelates proved able to rescue ashred of royal sacrality by interpreting that revolutionary transition as a workof divine providence in favor of the Protestant cause.9 But that option washardly available after the Act of Settlement of 1701, when the parliamentboldly skipped over the more direct and impressive hereditary credentials ofsome 52 (regrettably Catholic) claimants in order to lodge the succession inthe safely Protestant progeny of the distant Sophia, Electress of Hanover. Ifthe Glorious Revolution of 1688 was at least susceptible of being interpretedin terms other than the Whig affirmation of parliamentary supremacy, Lock-eian social contract, and the indefeasible right of a sovereign people tochoose its own rulers, the bleakly demystifying provisions of the Act of Settle-ment surely were not. Despite subsequent, understandably self-conscious,and no more than intermittently successful, attempts at remystification, theEnglish monarch, as Bagehot put it, was henceforth to be viewed as no morethan “a useful public functionary who [might] be changed, and in whoseplace you [might] make another.”10

In comparative context there was, no doubt, something a bit precociousabout the demystified drabness of the monarchical state of affairs in Englandafter the accession of George I in 1714. But if the process of desacralizationhad been moving more slowly and unevenly in relation to the other monar-chies of Europe – more tentatively, it may be, in the Habsburg states, moreobviously in Scandinavia and France – that it was in motion, Paul KléberMonod has recently argued, was unquestionable. Taking as his point of

The Fading Nimbus

136

departure the assassination by a Dominican friar of Henry III of France andbringing his analysis to a close with the death of Louis XIV in 1715, he hasconstructed a rich and subtly nuanced account of the complex way in whichthat process had been unfolding right across Europe. In the sixteenthcentury, he argues, kings had still conceived of themselves and been viewedby others, not as beings “dependent on popular approval,” but “as a reflec-tion of God, an ideal mirror of human identity,” a mediating “link betweenthe sacred and the self.” By 1715, however, a “momentous change” hadoccurred, one which ushered in the beginning of Weber’s “disenchantmentof the world.” What had taken place, in effect, was “a marked decline in theeffectiveness of political explanations that rested on the assumption ofsacredness or divine grace.” These had come to be supplemented, not somuch as yet by outright secularism as by “a religiously based [if quite exter-nal] obedience to an abstract, unitary human authority, combined with adeepened sense of individual moral responsibility” on the part of the subjector citizen – in effect, “sovereignty plus self-discipline,” the very foundationof “the rational state.”11

In the years intervening, two great upheavals had helped lubricate andaccelerate this complex process of change. First, the continued miseries ofthe French Religious Wars, during the course of which, and in succession,the Huguenots on the Protestant side and the supporters of the CatholicLeague on the Catholic “right” came to threaten the kingship itself in termsthat were at once both religious and constitutionalist. Second, the riots, dis-orders, and outright rebellions of the 1640s and 1650s, which reached wellbeyond England and France and extended to Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Por-tugal, Naples, Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia, and have led some historiansto speak, accordingly, of “the general crisis of the seventeenth century.”12

Thus the assassination by Catholic fanatics in 1589 and 1610 respectively ofHenry III and Henry IV of France were straws in the wind, signs of “thecontinuing fragility of French monarchy” (77), sailor’s “telltales” signalingshifting winds and the portent of heavy weather to come. The first case, cer-tainly, inspired as it was by the propaganda of the Catholic League with itsinsistence that the king was responsible to the people, Monod describes as“an unmistakable sign of the waning of the sacral monarchy throughoutEurope, the outcome of seven decades of religious reformation”(6). Simi-larly, the dramatic trial, judgment, and execution in 1649 of Charles I ofEngland had Europe-wide repercussions, and, while for some it fueled alively cult of “Charles the Martyr,” for others it “marked a decisive rejectionof royal mediation between God and the self” (146).

While conceding that the contemporaneous mid-century upheavals else-where in Europe were doubtless responsive to a broad array of differing,

The Fading Nimbus

137

localized discontents and cannot properly be understood without attentionpaid to the political, religious, economic, and institutional specificities oftime and place, Monod is bold enough to insist that they still had “certainreligious and intellectual features in common.” Notable among them was “atendency to appeal to an authority that was vested by God in . . . the bodyof the people rather than that of the monarch,” in “a distinct national com-munity” rather than in the king (150–1). That was true, if fleetingly, ofCatalonia, where those rebelling in 1641 against the Spanish king, beforethrowing their allegiance to Louis XIII of France, toyed with the establish-ment of a republican state. It was true later on of Naples where, in 1647–8, arepublic was actually established. It was true, again, of the United Provincesin 1650. There, in the attempt to pre-empt what was taken to be the wish ofWilliam II, Prince of Orange, to transform into a monarchical one his officeof stadtholder, an effort led by the provincial estates of Holland came closeto eliminating that position altogether in favor of an oligarchically controlledrepublican form of government. It was true, quintessentially of course, ofEngland, where the kingship was in fact abruptly abolished and the countryruled for 11 years in a republican mode represented (at least) as being moreresponsive to the fundamental principle that political power is inherent in thepeople itself. It was even in some measure true of the more radical amongthe Frondeurs in France where, in 1652–3, the rebels at Bordeaux (theOrmistes), rallying under the motto “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” claimed to haveestablished nothing less than “a Democratic Government” (179).

None of these anti-monarchical moves ultimately succeeded. By the endof 1650, William II had brought Amsterdam and Holland to heel. By 1652,the Spanish king had crushed the rebellions in both Catalonia and Naples,and Louis XIV’s troops had stamped out the Fronde. Eight years later, theEnglish experiment with republican institutions ended with a whimper ratherthan a bang, and the principle of hereditary kingship by divine right wasasserted once more in practice and lauded fulsomely in theory. Things,however, were never to be quite the same again. The very foundations ofkingship had sustained a great shock and measures had to be taken torespond to the potential for aftershocks. In order to avoid being sent awayonce more on his travels, Charles II had to maneuver deftly, accede to poli-cies he did not like, and be flexible enough to bend before more than onestorm. His brother and successor, James II, proved unable or unwilling to dolikewise, and he paid the price in 1688 by forfeiting his throne – an event theWhigs, at least, came eventually to represent in Lockeian terms as the vindi-cation of individual rights, social contract, and popular sovereignty. Even theseeming counter-case of Frederick II of Denmark, who succeeded in 1660 inbreaking free from high noble control and transforming his title to the

The Fading Nimbus

138

throne from an elective into an hereditary one, involved, in fact, a species ofpact with his subjects, codified in explicitly contractarian forms in the RoyalLaw of 1665, which Monod describes (207) as “one of the earliest foundingdocuments of the rational state.” In France, too, Bossuet’s essentially reli-gious vision of kingship to the contrary, Louis XIV came to view “the state inrationalist terms as a collective entity separate from his body, rather than amystical dignity within him” (214). He himself appears to have lacked anyreal inward or personal piety; the complex and much-analyzed rules of eti-quette (civilité) on which the palace of Versailles operated were “entirelyexternal and had nothing to do with inner piety.” “However reverential itsceremonies, French [palace] etiquette ‘embodied’ a rational pact betweenthe self and the state, not a mystical community with the deity” (218–19).

France was, of course, the most powerful state in Europe, and the trajec-tory followed by its monarchy down to the time of its abolition in 1793 andthe execution of Louis XVI was to serve as exemplar or reference point forthe subsequent transformation of kingship elsewhere. Already in the seven-teenth century, Monod argues, that trajectory had come in observablemeasure to be a desacralizing one. Disagree with one another though theymay about the pace and timing of change, perhaps also about the precisenature of the corrosive agents at work, other historians of France would notcall that basic claim into question. And in the eighteenth century the pace ofsecularization was to quicken.

During that century the progressive ebbing of the credence given to the“royal religion” was, of course, most dramatically evident in the derisiveincredulity of Enlightenment intellectuals like Montesquieu, whose PersianLetters obliquely mock the French king as a “great magician” who had suc-ceeded in conning his subjects into the foolish belief that he could “curethem of all kinds of diseases by touching them.”13 In the shaping of publicopinion the philosophes had some success in substituting themselves for king,magistracy, and clergy as the true spokesmen for the public interest. Theystripped “the king of his religious character,” they “scoffed at the coronationceremony, and declared that the king ruled not ‘by the grace of God’ but ‘bythe grace of his subjects.’” Further than that, indeed, “they parted companywith most of their contemporaries by repudiating the traditional conjunctionof religion and politics outright.”14

These were dramatic developments enough, but for most of those con-temporaries in fact – or so historians now incline to suggest – factors of aspecifically religious nature may have done more than the philosophes tosponsor a growing alienation from the regal pieties of yesteryear. Suchfactors, certainly, may properly be numbered among the corrosive forces des-tined to converge by the end of the century in such a way as to delegitimate

The Fading Nimbus

139

the very institution of kingship itself. Of the working of such factors twoillustrations must suffice.

Across the course of the seventeenth century, as age-old modes of royalsacrality came to be transposed into a less magical and more transparent key,they may be said to have taken on a less mediatorial and more representativetone. No longer, that is to say, did it suffice for the king to claim somehow toincorporate the sacred. Instead, he was now called upon to exemplify in hispersonal life the confessional values and spiritual aspirations of his subjects,and, in what Monod has dubbed felicitously as “the theatre of royal virtue,”to make public display of his commitment to “the constant religious andmoral principles that bound together the Christian community.”15 Thispublic role as “first of believers,” if played with conviction and skill, couldserve to bolster and strengthen the monarchy. It did so, certainly, in the caseof the emperor Ferdinand II (1617–37), a man of unaffected and disciplinedpersonal piety in the reformed Catholic mode. But it could just as easilydamage the cause if the royal actor who was called upon to play the role wasobviously lacking in that sort of spiritual and moral commitment. Despite (orbecause of) a surfeit of spiritual counsel and his own (concomitant?) religiousscruples, that proved somewhat disastrously to be the case with Louis XV ofFrance (1715–74). His long string of well-known and undiscriminating adul-terous relationships got in the way of his confessing and receivingcommunion, and that, in turn, or so he concluded on the advice of his rig-orist confessors, precluded for some 34 years his performing the royalmiracle of touching for the mal du roi. Coupled with his unpopularity andthe arbitrariness and indirection that marked the royal government duringhis latter years, this provoked a degree of revulsion, vilification, and populardemythologization that the piety and moral uprightness of his grandson andsuccessor, Louis XVI (1774–93), was to prove powerless to efface.

But even had Louis XV’s deportment in his private life not been so dam-agingly compromising, there is little reason to believe, that the sacral statusof the monarchy could have survived the bitter religious divisions occasionedin France by the clash between Jansenist and Jesuit. That great clash was rad-icalized by attempts to implement the sweeping condemnations voiced in thecontroversial papal bull Unigenitus (1714), which had cut so undiscriminat-ing a swathe through the thickets of Jansenist and supposedly Jansenistviews, and it was further exacerbated in the 1750s and 1760s by the unfortu-nate vacillations evident in royal religious policy. What ensued, Dale Van Kleyhas said, was

the formation or reformation of a Jesuitical and episcopal parti dévot(“devout” or “pious” party) on the monarchy’s right in some respects

The Fading Nimbus

140

reminiscent of the Catholic League, while some Jansenist energies chan-neled themselves into a political parti janséniste and developed a closerresemblance to Protestantism. The result was that the mid-eighteenthcentury replayed, albeit in a minor key, the religious-political conflicts ofthe sixteenth century.

Such “Jansenist-related controversies,” he adds, which “quite apart from theFrench Enlightenment” had done much to undercut regal sacrality,

brought Bourbon absolutism to its knees, undermining its last and bestjustification, which was to have imposed religious peace and to have suc-cessfully transcended the confessional fray. By the mid-eighteenth century,all the legislative and religious symbols of Louis Quatorzian divine-rightabsolutism . . . were all but dead letters.16

Disagree though they may about the generality, provenance, or pace of changein public opinion earlier in the century, historians appear generally to agreethat the latter half of the eighteenth century was, for France at least, a periodof quickening secularization.17 “Disenchantment,” the “crash” of “a systemof belief,” “desacralization of the monarchical person,” “dissolution of theaffective ties that had lent meaning to the symbolism of the royal body,”“breakdown” of the royal political mission, “besmirching” or “dysfunctional-ity” of divine right, “transformation of criticism of the monarch into a morestructural critique of the monarchy” itself, “privatization of religious senti-ment”, and desacralization of “everything between God and the ‘individual’religious conscience, divine right monarchy not excepted” – this by nowalmost liturgical litany of historiographic gloom could readily be extended.The kingship of which we catch a glimpse in the forbidden or undergroundliterature that Robert Darnton has analyzed emerges not only as discreditedbut also as so desacralized by the behavior of its incumbents as finally to have“lost its legitimacy.”18 Citing the cahiers de doléances (or nationwide memo-randa of concerns and grievances submitted in 1789), Chartier has noted “ashrinkage in the sacred nature and person of the king,” with whatever “sacral-ity” still attached to him being “no longer necessarily held to be divinelyinstituted,” but “often conceived as having been conferred by the nation.”And it was this “symbolic disenchantment,” he adds, “that by separating theking from divinity made possible (because conceivable) the revolutionaryholding him up to ridicule and finally executing him.”19 By the winter of 1792the principle of royal inviolability was being dismissed as nothing more than a“stupid dogma” or “political superstition.” Louis XVI had been transmutedfrom gold into dross, from His Most Christian Majesty into mere Louis

The Fading Nimbus

141

Capet. He was but a man, proclaimed Robespierre, and a guilty man at that, aman “deserving of death,” whose condemnation was nothing other than “ameasure of public safety” or an “act of national salvation.”20

The Deeper Wellsprings of Change

That “act of national salvation” took place on January 21, 1793. Reportingon that same day to the Commune of Paris, one of the commissionersappointed to attend the event said:

we did not take our eyes off Capet until he reached the guillotine. Hearrived at ten hours ten minutes; it took him three minutes to descendfrom the conveyance. He wanted to speak to the people. Santerre deniedthis; his head fell. The citizens dipped their pikes and their handkerchiefsin his blood.

Citing that report and noting that “the same acts of devotion were repeatedas had occurred after the decapitation of Charles I [of England]” in the pre-vious century, Sergio Bertelli has commented, nonetheless, that “in the threeminutes that it took Louis Capet to descend the steps of his carriage, a thou-sand years of the religio regis [religion of the king] ended.”21

That the event marked the culmination of the process of desacralizationthat had quickened in France two centuries earlier with the assassinations ofHenry III and Henry IV and accelerated in England with the execution ofCharles I is not in doubt. However electrifying, the brutal elimination in1918 of Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, and his entire immediate family, consti-tuted no more than a belated coda to the history of a process that had alreadyreached its term. In that respect, Bertelli’s comment is very much to thepoint. In one form or another, however, the religio regis of which he speaksreached much further back into the distant past than a mere thousand years.And so, too, it must once more be insisted, did the process of desacralizationitself.

In the chapters immediately preceding we focused on the complex accom-modations which, in the teeth of the secularizing thrust of biblical andQur’a-nic revelations alike, all three of the Abrahamic religions were led tomake with archaic notions of sacral kingship. Those accommodations,however, proved ultimately to be unstable, and in the first part of the presentchapter we went on to focus on the concluding phase of the desacralizingprocess during which they finally lost their cohesion and effectiveness. In sodoing, we have been subjecting such developments to comparatively closescrutiny under a species, as it were, of historiographic microscope. It is time

The Fading Nimbus

142

now, I would suggest, and as we close in on a conclusion, to stand well backfrom those accommodations and that culminating phase, substituting tele-scope, if you wish, for microscope, and allowing the full course of millennialchange to enter, distantly at least, within the ambit of our vision. Once we dothat, a whole concatenation of pertinent and complexly interacting ideologi-cal factors come gradually into focus. Of these, we will have to contentourselves here with selecting for brief discussion no more than a handful.

For those convinced that the religious tradition of the Christian west,faithful in this to its desacralizing biblical roots and in “an ongoing dialecticalrelationship with the ‘practical’ infrastructure of social life,” has “carried theseeds of secularization within itself,” the big question has always been whythe whole process took so very long to reach critical mass, why, in effect, wehave to wait until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before its disen-chanting impact begins to become altogether transparent. And to thatquestion the standard response, since Hegel at least, has been to distinguishbetween what have been called the normative and historical forms of Chris-tianity, and to emphasize the degree to which “those biblical norms abouthuman nature and human destiny that give to Christianity whatever identityit may possess” were muffled – for centuries, even, lost – in that historicalChristianity which, “though much of it is not specifically Christian,” still“reflects the composite of those cultural impulses that make up what is com-monly thought of as Christian civilization.” Or, with Peter Berger, putting itsomewhat more bluntly, to emphasize the degree to which Catholic Chris-tianity, with its numinous sense of the world as a sacramental one, suffusedwith the sacred and punctuated by miracles, constituted “an arresting andretrogressing step in the unfolding of the drama of secularization,” though inthe Latin west, at least, it still retained a “secularizing potential.” Thus, onlywith the Protestant Reformation do we see “a powerful re-emergence of pre-cisely those secularizing forces that had been ‘contained’ by Catholicism notonly replicating the Old Testament in this, but going decisively beyond it.”22

Recognizing with Berger the degree to which Protestantism, when com-pared with Catholicism, did indeed involve “an immense shrinkage in thescope of the sacred in reality,”23 one must concede the force of that response.At the same time, one must insist that it comes a little too easily. For withoutrecognizing also the prior impact on European intellectual sensibilities (andlong before the Reformation) of demystifying factors that owe nothing toProtestantism, it will be impossible to make adequate sense of the whole,extraordinary process of desacralization that has so profoundly shaped ourmodern Western consciousness.

Of these factors I select here for discussion only three. They pertain toways in which people have striven for an understanding, respectively, of

The Fading Nimbus

143

nature, man, and society. While acutely conscious of the danger of imposingan undue measure of schematization on a formidably complex array of his-torical developments, I narrow down attention to these three because Ibelieve them to be the most fundamental drivers of desacralizing change. Ichoose them, too, because however theoretical in nature they may havebeen they all intersected with other developments – social, political, techno-logical – of more gritty, practical import. They did not, in effect, function ingrand isolation but stood (in Berger’s sociological terms) “in an ongoingdialectical relationship with the ‘practical’ infrastructure of social life.”24 Ichoose them, finally, because present among them and at the deepest levelof all, is a certain interconnectedness stemming either from intellectualaffinity or direct logical entailment, and reflective of the sinuous continu-ities that exist in any coherent intellectual system between the seeminglydisparate realms of natural theology, natural philosophy, and moral, legal,and political philosophy.

The first of these factors is the most straightforward one and is widely rec-ognized to have been revolutionary in its implications – so much so, indeed,that it is unnecessary to belabor its importance here. What I have in mind isthe firm distinction which the New Testament draws between religious andpolitical loyalties. Again and again across the centuries, we have seen theforce of that distinction blunted by imperial and papal aspirations to establisha unitary Christian commonwealth under the leadership of either pontificalkings or monarchical pontiffs. Its importance might well have been lost sightof had it not linked with, found expression in, and, in return, been reinforcedby, the gradual emergence in western Europe of rival governmental struc-tures, temporal and ecclesiastical, both of them serving to limit each other’seffective power. And that was to be true, not only of Catholic Christendom,but also, after the Reformation, in those parts of Europe where Calvinismheld sway.

If, then, the great upheaval engendered in the eleventh century by theGregorian reform marked the onset of several centuries of intermittent butwidespread tension between the ecclesiastical and temporal authorities inLatin Christendom, it was a tension not simply between competing idealsbut between rival governmental structures. That institutional dualism servedincreasingly to give teeth to the fundamental distinction which Christ hadoriginally drawn. And there was something altogether novel about the stateof affairs thus engendered. “[T]here is really nothing unusual,” BrianTierney has said, “in one ruler aspiring to exercise supreme spiritual and tem-poral power. That . . . is a normal pattern of human government.” What wasunusual about the Middle Ages “was not that certain emperors and popesaspired to a theocratic role but that such ambitions were never wholly ful-

The Fading Nimbus

144

filled.”25 No doubt the dualism of governments that sponsored this novelstate of affairs was also the cause of an immense amount of wasteful anddestructive conflict. But it was a conflict that marked, nevertheless, the birthpangs of something new in the history of humankind, a society in which thestate was eventually to be stripped of its age-old religious aura and in whichits overriding claims on the loyalties of men were balanced and curtailed by arival authority – which was in turn, reciprocally, and in no less significantfashion, to find its own imperial ambitions thwarted by the power of thestate. A society distinguished therefore, by an established institutionaldualism and racked by the internal instability resulting therefrom.

It was, then, between the hammer and the anvil of conflicting authorities,ecclesiastical and temporal, that political freedoms were to be forged in thewest and monarchical ambitions (both secular and spiritual) eventually to bechastened. Medieval constitutionalism may have been the product of manymutually supportive factors, by no means all of them religious; but whateverthe strength of those factors, without the Christian insertion of the criticaldistinction between the religious and political spheres and without the insta-bility engendered as a result by the clash of rival authorities, it is extremelyunlikely that the Middle Ages would have bequeathed to the modern worldany legacy at all of limited government.

From the thirteenth century onwards, popes and temporal monarchs alikehad begun to develop representative instrumentalities and techniques in theireffort to marshal the cooperation of their subjects and to secure for theirpolicies and the mounting taxes necessary to finance them the consent, notsimply of the baronage but of the other (increasingly powerful) propertiedgroups among their subjects. The consent involved was initially consultativeor procedural in nature, in some ways akin, if you wish, to that involvedtoday in cases where the public authorities exercise their power to take pos-session of property by eminent domain (compulsory purchase). If anythingone might choose to call self-government was involved, it was, what one his-torian labeled as “self-government at the king’s command.”

In the course of time, however, that type of consent was destined to modu-late into the type that can truly be called “political” or “democratic” – ineffect, the sort of consent that expresses the sovereign will of the people andimplies some sort of limitation on the ruler’s prerogative. In the centuriesbefore the Protestant Reformation the persistent tension between kings andpopes helped sponsor that change, with kings turning to parliaments and rep-resentative estates in order to rally national opposition to papal pretensions,and, for similar reasons, at least from the time of Philip IV of France(1285–1314) onwards, mounting appeals from the authority of the papalmonarch to the superior authority seen to reside in the entire body of the

The Fading Nimbus

145

faithful and given expression by the general council representing it. Again, inthe century and a half after the onset of the Reformation, religious minorities,Calvinist and Catholic, anxious to be able to render to God the things thatwere God’s, were likewise to appeal from the authority of the kings who werepersecuting them to the superior authority they believed to reside in the entirecommunity of the realm and in the parliaments or estates representing it.

The New Testament distinction between religious and political loyalties,along with the form of governmental dualism that in the Latin Middle Agesgave it teeth, served also, then, to nudge to the forefront the historic princi-ple that it was popular consent that ultimately legitimated governmentalauthority. Originally very much a gritty practicality of effective government,consent came to be understood in the later Middle Ages as something morethan that, as a fundamental constitutional principle and one grounded in themandates of the natural law itself. By the early modern era it had modulatedaccordingly into the fundamental legitimating principle to which even royalauthority was in some measure subordinate. But it is important to be clearabout what consent actually meant for even the most “advanced” of medievalconsent theorists, or for the Protestant constitutionalists and resistance theo-rists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (French, Scottish, English,Dutch), as also for their counterparts among the ideologists of the CatholicLeague in France, and for the Spanish writers on matters political, Jesuit aswell as Dominican. Namely, it was the consent of free communities possessedat a minimum of the original right to choose their rulers, perhaps also tochoose the form of government under which they were to live, maybe evento participate on some sort of continuing basis in the governmental processand to serve as a counterweight to the abuse of monarchical power. Absentfrom it, however, was the crucial feature that serves truly to distinguish thewhole modern contractarian tradition of political thinking running fromHobbes, via Locke, to Kant – that is, the ascription to the autonomous indi-vidual will of an unprecedented importance, a real choice as to whether ornot to implicate itself in politics at all. Consent, in effect, and despite someformulations seemingly “modern” in their intonation, was not yet quiteunderstood as the assent of a concatenation of free and equal individualsimposing on themselves an obligation which of their ultimate autonomy theycould well avoid. It came to be understood in that novel way only when tra-ditional notions of community or corporate consent had come to beimpregnated by Christian notions of moral autonomy, by an individualismand a voluntarism that were ultimately of biblical provenance. And the rise toprominence of that species of individualism and voluntarism was the secondfundamental factor advancing the process of desacralization that can be seento have been at work long before the coming of the Reformation.

The Fading Nimbus

146

In one of those lucid shafts of historical insight that pierce the gloom ofhis philosophical discourse, Hegel made a series of interrelated claimsdirectly pertinent to this issue. First, that “the principle of the self-subsistentinherently infinite personality of the individual, the principle of subjectivefreedom . . . is historically subsequent to the Greek World,” that it is “thepivot and the center of the difference between antiquity and modern times.”Second, that it was Christianity that gave it full expression, making it “theuniversal effective principle of a new form of civilization.” Third, that thatprinciple arose first in religion and was introduced into the secular world only“by a long and severe effort of civilization.” Fourth, that during the MiddleAges, the authoritarianism and externalism of the hierarchical church had theeffect of blunting that effort, taking itself the place of man’s conscience,laying its stress on “outward actions” that were not “the promptings of hisown good will” but were performed at its command, and succeeding inobscuring the fundamental principle of subjective freedom until that princi-ple was finally thrown into bold relief by “the all-enlightening Sun” of theProtestant Reformation.26

Hegel distorted the picture somewhat, I would judge, when in his fourthclaim he confined the process almost entirely to the period after the Refor-mation. But with that caveat duly noted, I would affirm the rectitude of hisgeneral claim. The deepest roots of what he calls “the principle of subjectivefreedom,” along with the related emphasis on will and responsibility, areindeed engaged, not in Hellenic soil, but in the biblical doctrine of divineomnipotence and the historically singular doctrine of creation that goes withit.27 That principle and its related emphases were indeed felt first in mattersreligious and it was centuries before they touched the secular sensibilities andbegan to revolutionize the modalities of western political thinking. Duringthe patristic period, even in matters religious, the form of individualism thatwe think of as quintessentially Christian was able to make its way but slowlyin the teeth of such alien notions as the cyclicity of time or that of the divinesoul and its primordial fall into matter. With the collapse of the Romanworld, moreover, and the transformation of Latin Christianity through itsencounter with religious sensibilities shaped in the mould of Celtic andGerman paganism, the characteristically Christian concern with the relation-ship of the individual soul to God was to a remarkable degree submerged inthe rhythms of a devotional life that was communal rather than personal,external rather than internal, public rather than private – one very much athome, in fact, with societies in which kings were seen to play a sacred, media-torial role between their subjects and the divine.

Only in the late eleventh century did that form of Christian individualismbegin once more to surface in the spiritual literature. Linked now with a

The Fading Nimbus

147

marked emotionalism and a firm stress on the role of the individual will inthe encounter with the divine, and borne far and wide by the proponents firstof the Cistercian spirituality and then of the Franciscan, it came to reside atthe very heart of late medieval religion. During the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies, moreover, its voluntarism was paralleled in moral philosophy andtheology by the heightened emphasis which the scholastic thinkers of theFranciscan school came to place on the role of will, duty, and intention inmatters ethical. Notwithstanding the prominence, however, of the roleascribed to the individual will in religious and moral living, one would searchthe medieval world in vain for any parallel insistence that the political life, likethe life of moral virtue, requires moral assent, personal choice, the expressedwillingness of the individual to implicate himself in that life. That insistencewas to come only much later, long after the inception of the Reformationand after some of the Puritans of Elizabethan England had finally abandonedtheir earlier scruples about separating from the Anglican church establish-ment and had come to think in terms of reform “without tarrying for any.”28

Only then did the sectarianism of the “Radical Reformation” begin to maketruly significant inroads upon one of the established strongholds of Protes-tantism, bringing with it the concept of the Church as a sect or voluntarysociety based on a covenanted group of true believers who had entered it “onthe basis of conscious conversion.”29 As the seventeenth century wore on,those separatists appear to have gone on “to interpret bodies politic as if theywere sectarian congregations,” attributing “to citizens, as natural rights, therights of moral autonomy and self-government that they had demanded forthemselves as members of the congregation.”30

Thus, by 1645–6, in the wake of the First Civil War in England, John Lil-burne, the Leveler leader, and his colleagues Richard Overton and WilliamWalwyn were clearly applying to secular political society the same voluntaris-tic, consensual, and implicitly contractarian model they had long since beenaccustomed to applying to the visible church. “God,” Lilburne argued, “theabsolute Soveraigne Lord and King of all things,” having endowed man hiscreature “with a rationall soule or understanding, and thereby created himafter his own image,” made him Lord over the rest of his creatures, but not“over the individuals of Mankind, no further than by free consent or agree-ment, by giving up their power, each to the other, for their better being.”Similarly, in the classic invocation of natural rights with which he opens hispamphlet An Arrow against all Tyrants, Overton states that “To every Indi-viduall in nature, is given an individual property by nature, not to be invadedor usurped by any: for every one as he is in himselfe, so he hath a selfe propri-ety, else could he not be himselfe.” All being naturally equal and free,

The Fading Nimbus

148

from this foundation or root, all just humaine powers take their original;not immediately from God (as kings usually plead their prerogatives) butmediately by the hand of nature . . ., for originally God hath implantedthem in the creature, and from the creature those powers immediatelyproceed; . . . Every man by nature being a King, Priest and Prophet in hisowne naturall circuite and compasse, whereof no second may partake, butby deputation, commission, and free consent from him, whose naturallright and freedom it is.31

Lilburne, Overton, and the other Levelers were, of course, extremists. So,too, though in a different fashion, was Thomas Hobbes. During the samedecade, if via a somewhat different route, he, too, broke through to a simi-larly individualistic and voluntarist conception of the foundations of politicallegitimacy – though in his case placing it in service to the cause of govern-mental absolutism and in opposition to the traditional constitutionalismwhich Lilburne had sought to radicalize, simplify, and purify. Writing nearlyhalf a century later, John Locke was to share the voluntarism and radical indi-vidualism that was central to the political thinking of Hobbes and theLevelers alike. Unlike Hobbes, it is true, he contrived to wed it to the olderconstitutionalist tradition. At the same time, and in this unlike the Levelers,he clearly did not feel unduly compelled to radicalize that tradition or todevelop it in a more democratic direction. What he did do, however, andmost influentially, was to project forward into the eighteenth century, and tohelp naturalize in the new political “common sense” that was now crystalliz-ing in that era, a secularized vision of politics. That new vision was destinedto undercut the very foundations of divine-right theory and to consign toideological redundancy any notion of sacred royal mediation between Godand the individual subject or citizen.

That it did so, moreover, owed something to the fundamental congruencebetween Locke’s moral and political thinking and his new, “scientific” under-standing of the nature and operations of the natural world. And that reflects,in turn, the complex workings across time of the third, and most abstract, ofthe three factors sponsoring the process of desacralization that I have identi-fied as fundamental. That factor falls into the realms of natural theology andnatural philosophy and concerns the changing ways in which human beingshave understood the nature of the natural world at large. In the first chapterof this book, making the case that the “cosmic religiosity” was the very foun-dation for the archaic pattern of divine or sacral kingship, I emphasized howvery fundamental was the archaic sense that there existed a consubstantialitybetween God, nature, and man, a divine continuum, as it were, linkinghumankind with nature and the state with the cosmos. In the second chapter,

The Fading Nimbus

149

discussing the Hebraic kingship, I argued further that the biblical idea of cre-ation and the understanding of God as one, transcendent, and omnipotentwhich it presupposed, logically entailed the denial of that consubstantialityand the de-divinization or desacralization of nature – or put differently, thedrainage of the divine from a natural world, created, as it was, out of nothingby the omnipotent fiat of a divine will external to it. Hence the destructionof the metaphysical underpinnings for any understanding, archaic style, ofthe state as “the embodiment of the cosmic totality.”

The trouble is, of course, that despite the periodic pangs of what I havecalled “Abrahamic unease” evident in the attitude of the Hebrew prophetstowards the status of their kings, the sort of “logical entailment” of which Ihave so casually spoken necessarily presupposes the existence of an essentiallyphilosophical consciousness about what the nature and attributes ascribed inthe biblical texts to Yahweh might in themselves mean, as also what theymight entail for one’s understanding of the nature of nature and the nature ofhumankind. It was to take centuries for such a consciousness to crystallize. Itemerged, in fact, only in late antiquity, not long before the dawn of theCommon Era when Jerusalem finally encountered Athens, and Jewish intel-lectuals in the great Alexandrian community as well as their Hellenizingsuccessors among the Christian church fathers (men like Philo, Clement ofAlexandria and Origen) began to exploit the modalities of Greek philosophicalthinking in order to penetrate and elucidate the meaning of the biblicalmessage. When they did that, as we saw in chapter 3, with Philo being thegreat pace-setter, they opened up the way for the historic Eusebian absorptionof the Hellenistic philosophy of kingship and for the elaboration of a Chris-tianized version of the archaic pattern of sacral kingship that lay behind it.

Their engagement with Greek thought, however, took place along a muchbroader intellectual front than that of political philosophy alone. It was tolead not only to the deep penetration of Christian modes of theologizing byphilosophic notions of Greek provenance, but also to the elaboration by thegreat medieval philosopher-theologians of a variety of metaphysical systems,most of them Neoplatonic or Aristotelian in their inspiration. And if thatextraordinary achievement was to leave a legacy that has been compared in itsarchitectonic grandeur to the contemporaneous splendor of the great Gothiccathedrals (Panofsky), it was not an achievement bereft of structural flaws.32

Both Plato and Aristotle had elaborated distinctive and highly sophisti-cated conceptions of God. Behind those conceptions, however, lay apre-philosophical understanding of the divine which, in its broad characteris-tics, the Greeks shared with the other peoples of the archaic world. It is thepoint of view that we have seen to underpin notions of sacral kingship, onethat failed to differentiate the divine from the world of nature, or, to the

The Fading Nimbus

150

extent to which it did achieve such a differentiation, did so by regarding thenatural world in general, and natural things and processes in particular, as insome sense a manifestation of the divine. Though Plato and Aristotle bothadvanced beyond that point of view, they did so without wholly abandoningit. Thus Plato could speak of the universe as “a blessed god” and Aristotlecould characterize as “inspired” the old myth that the first substances “aregods and that the divine encloses the whole of nature.”33

Translated onto the philosophic plane, however, the archaic point of viewfound more characteristic expression in the notion of the divine as beingimmanent in nature, related to it as an indwelling and organizing principle,the source at once of the order of its movements and of the unity of its dis-parate parts. The analogy involved was the relation of mind to body in man,and the universe was conceived as a great organism permeated by mind orsoul; but if the Greeks saw in the orderliness of natural processes the workingof an intelligence, eternal and divine, it was not a divine intelligence thattranscended nature, nor was it any more eternal than was the material worlditself. When Plato sought to vindicate the presence of mind in the universe,he did so without questioning the eternity of the matter out of which theuniverse had been fashioned. Thus in the Timaeus (an extremely problematicwork but the Platonic dialogue that Philo, the early Christian fathers, andthe medieval theologians all knew best) he depicts the Demiurge or WorldMaker as a sort of cosmic artisan fashioning an intelligible universe out ofpreexistent matter in accordance with the eternally subsistent “Forms,”essences, archetypes, or “Ideas” that serve him as the exemplars, patterns,blueprints, or templates for all things.

As we have seen Mircea Eliade to suggest, the Timaeus, therefore, hassomething in common with such archaic creation myths as the BabylonianEnûma Elish. Like those myths it is concerned, not with creation in the sensethat Jews, Christians, and Muslims usually ascribe to that word, but ratherwith the emergence of cosmos, or ordered, harmonious system, out of somesort of preexisting chaos. The Demiurge, certainly, is no omnipotent creator-God. Neither the Ideas nor matter owe their existence to him; far from it,indeed, for both by their existence impose limits on his creative activity.Nowhere is it suggested that he should be an object of worship, and Platomay well have intended him not to be understood literally but rather as amythical symbol standing for the presence in the universe of a divine reasonanalogous to man’s and “working for ends that are good.” Something similarmay be said of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in which he presents no creation story,it is true (his universe is eternal), but the notion of a First Principle which,while it transcends the universe is also immanent in it “as the order of itsparts.” Aristotle calls this first principle “God,” but it is neither a personal

The Fading Nimbus

151

God, nor a creator-God, nor an object of worship. Instead, it is an UnmovedMover, the final and highest good that, because all things aspire and cease-lessly strive to emulate its perfection, serves as the cause of motion or changein the universe. Thus, as Dante tells us in the profoundly Aristotelian wordswith which he concludes the Divine Comedy, it is “love that moves the sunand the other stars.”

Put in this way, both Plato’s and Aristotle’s understanding of the nature ofthe divine, of the universe, and of the relationship between them wouldappear to be wholly incompatible with the parallel Judaic and Christianviews; but then neither Plato nor Aristotle put these things quite so simply.Their writings were fraught with ambiguities and problems of interpretationthat were to leave room for subsequent Christian philosophers to mould Pla-tonic and Aristotelian views in such a way as to render them less difficult toharmonize with biblical notions. That was to be the fate of Plato in theMediterranean world during the first centuries of the Common Era (or, atleast, the fate of the “Neoplatonic” extension of his ideas). Later on, in theEuropean scholastic world of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it wasalso to be the fate of the newly rediscovered Aristotelian system.

So far as the fate of the Platonic inheritance goes, there can be few devel-opments in the history of philosophy more tangled, more complex, moredramatic than the movement of ideas in late antiquity that culminated in thefourth century in the Neoplatonic patterns of thought which St Augustineencountered in what he was wont to call “the books of the Platonists.”Reflecting, among other things, a persistent tendency to understand themysterious Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus, not as some sort of mythic symbol,but, literally, as a World Maker, it went on to conflate him with the transcen-dent Unmoved Mover of Aristotle’s Metaphysics – the final and highest goodwhich he himself called “God,” and then to interpret the Forms, essences, orIdeas no longer as independent entities but rather as thoughts or ideas orarchetypes in the mind of the supreme God produced by that macrocosmicconflation. Thus emerged the notion of a transcendent God, at once theHighest Good to which all things aspire, the First Cause from which allthings derive their being, the Supreme Reason to which all things owe theirorder and intelligibility, and, increasingly (Neoplatonism being a path of sal-vation as well as a philosophy) the object of a real devotional sentiment.

Given this development, it is not too hard to understand how St Augus-tine, following in the fifth century the trail first blazed at Alexandria by PhiloJudaeus and later broadened by the Greek church fathers, was able, via anextraordinary achievement of philosophico-theological bridge-building andin a fashion that proved to be definitive for Western Christian philosophy, toengineer a further and really quite stunning conflation: the identification of

The Fading Nimbus

152

the Neoplatonic God – the God of the philosophers, as it were, in its final,most complex, and most developed form – with the biblical God of Abraham,Isaac, and Jacob, the personal God of power and might who not only tran-scends the universe but also, of his omnipotence, created it, not out ofPlatonic or Aristotelian pre-existent matter, but out of nothing. The provi-dential God, moreover, from whose omniscient purview not even the fall of asparrow escapes (Matthew 10:29) and against whose miraculous interventionnot even the might of a Nebuchadnezzar was proof (Daniel 3). In so doing,Augustine attempted to close the way to any further Christian flirtation withthe Greek notion of the eternity of the world such as that indulged by theAlexandrian theologian Origen two centuries earlier. At the same time, byagreeing with Philo, the Neoplatonists, and many of his Christian predeces-sors that the creative act was indeed an intelligent one guided by Forms,Ideas, or archetypes in the Platonic mould, but Ideas now situated in thedivine mind itself as a sort of creative blueprint, he responded to the Greekconcern to vindicate philosophically the order and intelligibility of theuniverse.

This was clearly a quite extraordinary accommodation. I would suggest,however, that what it reflected was a victory for delicate philosophical andtheological diplomacy rather than the achievement of any truly stable synthe-sis. In the historic encounter between Athens and Jerusalem, between theGreek philosophical tradition and religious views of biblical provenance, thegreat stumbling block had been (and was to remain) the sheer difficulty ofreconciling the personal and transcendent God of power and might, uponwhose will the very existence of the world was radically contingent, with thearchaic and characteristically Greek intuition of the divine as limited andinnerworldly and of the universe as necessary and eternal, or, to put it differ-ently, with the persistent tendency of the Greek philosophers to identify thedivine with the immanent and necessary order of an eternal cosmos.

The retention of the Platonic ideas witnesses to the impact of that endur-ing tension. The denial of their independent existence and their location inthe mind of God reflects the desire to make room for the biblical conceptionof the divine as almighty power and unimpeded will. But the nagging ques-tion of course remained: Was it room enough? If the universe was trulyrational and ultimately intelligible, could God ever be willful? And if Godcould really be willful, could the universe be fully rational and intelligible?What had guaranteed the bedrock rationality of Plato’s universe, after all, hadbeen the subordination of the Demiurge’s craftsmanlike creative activity tothe patterns, blueprints, or archetypes presented to him in the independentand co-eternal Forms or Ideas. But when the biblical Job had sought somejustification comprehensible in terms of human reason, for the disasters his

The Fading Nimbus

153

Hebraic God had visited upon him, God’s reply was not a reassuring vindica-tion of the rationality and stability of his justice, but rather a disdainful andterrifying evocation of his omnipotence. “Where were you when I laid thefoundations of the earth? . . . Have you commanded the morning since yourdays began? . . . Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords ofOrion? . . . Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?” (Job 38:4, 12,31; 40:2).

Much has been written over the years about the dramatic impact ofAthens upon Jerusalem, about the enrichment of the primitive Christianvision resulting from the penetration of biblical modes of thought by philo-sophic ideas of Greek provenance. Without it, certainly, and the type ofspecifically Catholic Christianity it helped shape, the desacralizing thrust ofthe biblical vision would not have been blunted to the extent it was, nor forso very long. Without it, too, the Eusebian and other complex patterns ofChristological thinking which eased the way for the survival into the MiddleAges and beyond of Christianized versions of the archaic notion of royalsacrality would scarcely have been possible. Without it, again, the subsequenterection in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of those grand, architec-tonic scholastic structures of thought – of which Thomas Aquinas’s Summatheologiae is the most celebrated – would have been altogether inconceivable.

But while it has been much less common to do so, we need to acknowl-edge also, if we are to penetrate to the heart of the Western intellectualtradition, the less obvious but no less profound impact of Jerusalem uponAthens. That impact, which made itself felt quite slowly and largely in thecourse of the late medieval and early modern centuries, was the necessaryprecondition for the emergence of the natural philosophy presupposed bythe emergent physical science of the seventeenth century, as also for the secu-larist character of the subsequent Enlightenment project. We need toacknowledge, that is to say, the internal tensions built into the very fabric ofthe Christian accommodation with Greek philosophical patterns of thought,and the concomitant instability of those grand scholastic structures which, inthe great effort to render compatible the contradictory and harmonious thedissonant, depended upon the employment of an array of exceedingly refinedbut weight-bearing and supportive distinctions. Or, substituting for thearchitectural a terrestrial image to which I have become attached, we need torecognize the fact that a profound geologic fault runs right across the con-flicted landscape of our Western intellectual tradition. Along that faultseismic activity is inevitably to be expected – the bumping, the grinding, thesubduction, if you wish, of those great tectonic plates of disparate Greek andbiblical provenance which collided in late antiquity to form the unstable con-tinent of our mentalité.

The Fading Nimbus

154

Two particular episodes of such seismic activity may be identified ashaving been powerful enough to affect a significant reshaping of the intellec-tual landscape. The first of these occurred in European university circles ofthe late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and thrust up into prominencethe quasi-empiricist mode of thinking pioneered by William of Ockham(d. 1349) and those who followed him in the “nominalist” tradition ofthinking or what came to be known as “the modern way” (via moderna).The second occurred in the seventeenth century and, having pushed to oneside the Neoplatonic modes of thought dear to the so-called Cambridge Pla-tonists and shaken to its very foundations the regnant Aristotelianism of theday, eventuated in the atomistic and mechanistic natural philosophy pio-neered by such thinkers as Pierre Gassendi, Walter Charleton, and RobertBoyle, given classic and enormously influential expression by Sir IsaacNewton, and leaving as its residue the forms of deistic thinking commonamong the philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

It is impossible here to dwell at any length on either of those episodes.Suffice it to say that both involved a theologically driven reaction to thedanger that Aristotelian rationalism was seen to pose to the freedom andomnipotence of the Christian God. That that was the case with William ofOckham – whose thinking has been described as dominated by the firstwords of the Christian creed: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty”34

– is generally conceded. And that it was almost equally the case with thosewho hammered out the tradition of natural philosophizing culminating inwhat it was once fashionable to call “the Scientific Revolution” is comingincreasingly to be recognized. After all, it was Boyle himself who, havingcited the Aristotelian denial to God of both the creation and providentialgovernance of the world, confessed that he took “divers of Aristotle’s opin-ions relating to religion to be more unfriendly, not to say pernicious to it,than those of several other heathen philosophers” – prominent among them,it seems clear, the atomistic views of those he called the “Epicurean and othercorpuscularian infidels.”35 In their intense preoccupation with the divineomnipotence, fourteenth-century nominalists and seventeenth-century sci-entists were alike led to set God over against the world he had created, toview that world as composed of a concatenation of singular existents radicallydependent on the divine decision, and to regard the order of that world,accordingly, as deriving not from any sort of participation (Thomistic orCambridge Platonist fashion) in the divine reason, but rather from theperemptory mandates of the divine will. The uniformities observable innature, to which the seventeenth-century scientists applied the term “laws ofnature,” they viewed, not in Greek fashion as the manifestation of an imma-nent divine reason, but as being, rather, of external divine imposition (in

The Fading Nimbus

155

Ockham’s terms, “the laws ordained and instituted by God”), and the worlditself, not as a “living” organism possessed of its own intelligibility, but as aninanimate machine operating in accordance with the norms of behavior thusimposed upon it.

The dominion which the Aristotelian physics continued to exercise overthe minds even of the late medieval nominalists was such that they failed towork through or realize the full implications of their own fundamental philo-sophical commitments for the realm of what we would call natural science.That was to be the achievement, instead, of the great physical scientists of theseventeenth century who finally broke with the classical Greek understandingof nature as an intelligible organism, an understanding based ultimately on ananalogy between the world of nature and the individual human being.Instead, and reflecting in this the historic confluence between the biblical ideaof a creative and omnipotent God and the rich late medieval and early modernexperience of designing and constructing machines (thus R.G. Colling-wood),36 the seventeenth-century physical scientists came to view the world asbeing devoid of intelligence and life, bereft of numinosity, drained of the lastvestiges of the sacred or divine, a great and wondrous machine grinding on itsinexorable course in accord with those laws or uniformities which God at thecreation had imposed upon it.

As, in the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the newphysical science grew in power and prestige, and as its simplified populariza-tions grew in influence, the thoroughly disenchanted picture of the universewhich it projected served understandably to deprive already enfeeblednotions of royal sacrality of whatever lingering measure of sustenance theymay still have been able to derive from the memories of more congenial andtraditional modes of natural theology and philosophy. Already in the mid-seventeenth century the philosophical writings of Thomas Hobbes gave aclear (if precocious) signal about what the new way of viewing nature mightentail for political philosophy. For characteristic of the Hobbesian system of“Will and Artifice,” as Michael Oakeshott has pointed out, the thought as itwere that pervades its parts, is the understanding of the universe as thecontingent creation of an omnipotent divine will; of the “civil order,”accordingly, as an artificial creation of a concatenation of individual acts ofautonomous human willing; the understanding of philosophical knowledgeas “conditional not absolute,” for “there is no effect which the power of [theomnipotent] God cannot produce in many several ways”; the definition oflaw, divine and natural no less than human, as the mandate of a sovereignwill; the understanding of the civil order no less than the world at large “onthe analogy of a machine, where to explain an effect we go to its immediate[efficient] cause; and to seek the result of the cause we go to its immediate

The Fading Nimbus

156

effect”; and the concomitant banishment from the realm of law and politicsno less than from the natural world at large of those age-old teleological pre-occupations which ill-accorded with so mechanistic an understanding ofreality.37

Nor was that the only signal that Hobbes gave. In the Leviathan, speakingof the compromising accommodations which “the doctors of the RomanChurch” had made with pagan religious practices, and describing them ashaving “filled up again” those “old empty bottles of Gentilism . . . with thenew wine of Christianity,” Hobbes also predicted that in the end that headynew wine could not fail to break them.38 Of that process, the fate of theChristianized version of archaic regal sacrality may be said to be a case inpoint. It may have taken an unconscionable amount of time to do so, but, asthe very tenor of Hobbes’s own philosophical system makes clear, that newwine was indeed destined finally to burst those age-old bottles. On that, ifnot necessarily on everything, Hobbes in effect was right.

The Fading Nimbus

157

The assumption that the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries areto be lumped together as constituting no more than an epilogue to the mil-lennial career of kingship may well seem questionable. The defeat ofNapoleon I in 1815 ushered in, after all, a conservative era of monarchicalrestoration. The ancient Bourbon dynasty was returned to the Frenchthrone, and the popes, whose monarchical office had seemed destined forextinction along with that of the Holy Roman Emperors, regained theirpoise and something more than that. As the century wore on, they were ablein fact to ride a gathering wave of grass-roots support to a dramatic triumphat the First Vatican Council (1870) over the tradition of conciliarist constitu-tionalism which had in the past so often threatened to hem in with legalrestraints the free exercise of their high prerogatives. The latter decades ofthe century, moreover, were also to see the formal establishment of a BritishIndian empire, the dramatic return of the Japanese imperial office fromcenturies of provincial obscurity to the very center of national government,and the advent in Europe of a new German empire and a unified nationalkingdom in Italy. In mid-century, it is true, the British had put an end to theMoghul empire in India. Later on, evanescent spin-off monarchies had risenand fallen in Mexico and Brazil, and in 1913, though Pu Yi, its last incum-bent, was to live on until 1967, the age-old office of Chinese emperorceased, in effect, to exist. But in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, thegreat majority of European states, certainly, remained stolidly monarchical.

Stolidly, it may be, but not necessarily solidly. The regal realities were nolonger what they once had been. For reasons other than those Shakespearemay have had in mind, it was indeed the case in the nineteenth century thatuneasy lay the head that wore a crown. In 1830, a revolution of liberal inspi-ration led in France to the abdication of the Bourbon king Charles X and the

EpilogueSurvivals and Revivals

158

installation in the person of Louis-Philippe of the quasi-constitutionalist Julymonarchy. It had the effect also of setting off revolutionary reverberations inBelgium, Poland, and some of the German and Italian states. Again, in1848, a citizen-uprising in Paris, eventuating rapidly in the collapse of theJuly monarchy and the establishment of a republic, set the example for revo-lutionary upheavals right across Europe – from Sicily and the papal states inthe south to Saxony and Hanover in the north, Hungary and Austria in theeast to Württenberg and Baden in the west. By 1850, order had everywherebeen restored, republican institutions and liberal constitutions had been dis-mantled, and kings were once more in command. But the institution ofmonarchy had sustained a massive onslaught and the fragility of its rootagein popular esteem had been exposed. So, too, had the need for kings toconnect more effectively with their subjects and to find some way to bolstertheir legitimacy with at least a simulacrum of popular consent. When Louis-Philippe, who was sometimes to be referred to as the “Citizen King,” wasproclaimed successor to the erstwhile Charles X on the French throne, hewas dubbed “King of the French by the Grace of God and the Will ofthe People.” And the later Bonapartist penchant for the plebiscite reflectsthe growing sense that without some solicitation of popular consent royallegitimacy could hardly be vindicated. If hypocrisy is indeed the tribute thatvice pays to virtue, the device of the plebiscite was henceforth to be thetribute that modern authoritarian rulers felt it necessary to pay to the ideal ofpopular sovereignty.

That notwithstanding, for kings, emperors, and their families, the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries were to be punctuated and shadowed byabdications, depositions, assassination, and the fear of assassination. Despitetightening security and the creation of secret police agencies, such attemptssometimes succeeded. Such was the case with Tsar Alexander III of Russia in1881, with the Empress of Austria in 1898, with the king of Portugal and hisheir in 1908 (followed in 1910 by the deposition of their successor), with theking of Greece in 1913, and in 1914, with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand,heir-apparent to the Austrian throne – the event that was to precipitate theonset of the Great War.

Any doubt about the increasing fragility of the royal purchase on powerand the progressive weakening of the affective ties binding subjects to theirkings was to be dissipated by the veritable clean-out of emperors and kingsthat was to occur in Europe and elsewhere in the wake of the two world wars.The German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires all ceased toexist in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Spain (though the monar-chy there was later to be restored) became a republic in 1931, Yugoslavia in1945, Albania, Bulgaria, and Italy in 1946, Romania in 1947, Egypt in 1952,

Epilogue

159

Iraq in 1958, Yemen in 1962, Libya in 1969, Cambodia in 1970 (though themonarchy there was later to be restored), Afghanistan and Greece in 1973,Ethiopia and Laos in 1974–75, Iran in 1979 – the list is impressive enoughfor one writer to refer to it as a veritable “culling” of the royal ranks.

Recent years have witnessed scattered talk about the possible restorationof kingship in Afghanistan, Bulgaria, and Iraq, and in 1975 it made a decisiveand successful return to Spain, where in 1981 the new king, Juan Carlos, wonthe hearts of his people by standing firm against the threat of a military coupand, in a dramatic television address, rallying the nation in support of thedemocratic constitution. For those of staunchly monarchist sympathies,however, the established trend can hardly seem encouraging. Of the handfulof monarchies that have survived into the twenty-first century, those of Nepaland Cambodia are clearly beleaguered, and only an inveterate gambler, Isuspect, would put much money on the long-term survival of kingship inBhutan, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, or Swaziland. Other royal figureselsewhere in Africa, especially anglophone West Africa, continue to playimportant ritual and informal political roles as arbiters of status and wieldersof influence in public life, but they have long since been “moved to a positionof governmental marginality” and, however significant as social and religiousfigures, function “outside the realm of the official structures of the state.”1

The well established constitutional monarchies of Japan, Thailand, GreatBritain, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden still possess, ofcourse, an official and much more secure political status. But even in suchcomparatively safe harbors for monarchy, royal families have found their insti-tutional moorings occasionally strained by the outbreak of storms of adversepublic opinion. Edward VIII of Great Britain was nudged into abdication in1936, popular hostility forced Leopold of Belgium to abdicate in favor of hisson Baudouin in 1951, and in the years since then the Dutch, Norwegian,and British monarchies have all been rattled by the negative reverberations ofwhat their irritated subjects clearly viewed as scandalous or inappropriateroyal behavior. In the case of the British royal family, indeed, it has led totheir becoming once more the object of intermittent derision, rather than ofthe persistent adulation heaped upon them during the greater part of thetwentieth century.

If, then, one stands well back and views the royal scene from afar, the onecase where a monarchy can be seen to have gained from the nineteenthcentury to the present in both power and prestige would appear to be that ofthe papacy. Its specifically temporal power, confined now to the narrowcompass of Vatican City, may have been reduced to the status of little morethan symbolic remnant. But in the degree to which, via effective centralizedgovernmental agencies, mechanisms, procedures, and instrumentalities of

Epilogue

160

communication, it is actually able on a day-to-day basis to impose its sover-eign will on the provincial churches of Roman Catholic Christendom, thepapal monarchy stands today at the very apex of its effective power within theChurch and, after the long, high-profile pontificate of John Paul II, close tothe apex of its prestige worldwide. The Second Vatican Council (1962–5)made much of the collective or “collegial” responsibility of the corps ofbishops for the mission and wellbeing of the universal Church. But it shouldnot be forgotten that at every point in Lumen gentium (its “constitution” ordecree on the Church) it assigned the explicitly governmental or jurisdic-tional power to the episcopal college’s papal head alone. Only in“hierarchical communion with the head of the college and its members” canbishops exercise their various offices, governance included. Only throughpapal convocation and confirmation can a council be ecumenical. Only withpapal approbation can the acts of such a council become valid. Further thanthat, as head of the episcopal college the pope “alone can perform certainacts which are no way within the competence of the bishops,” can proceed,taking “into account the good of the Church” and “according to his owndiscretion,” in “setting up, encouraging, and approving collegial activity,”and, “as supreme pastor of the Church, can exercise his power at all times ashe thinks best” (suam potestatem omni tempore ad placitum exercere potest).2

In the 1960s, Pope Paul VI conspicuously retired to museum status thepapal crown and other traditional trappings of papal regality. But he relin-quished none of the prerogatives and powers pertaining to his ancient highoffice. Though it would doubtless try to shrug off the designation, it remainsthe case that the papacy, which a thousand years ago launched a frontalassault on the sacral pretensions of the German emperors, stands out in soli-tary splendor today as itself the last of the truly great sacral monarchies.

It is not inappropriate, then, to view the nineteenth and twentieth cen-turies as constituting no more than an epilogue to the long career ofkingship. The claims commonly made for the French Revolution as being thedecisive turning point in the desacralization of kingship and the delegitima-tion of the monarchical office would appear to be warranted. Time, then, toreturn, by way of conclusion to that great historical watershed. In The Rebel(L’Homme Revolté) Albert Camus wrote that “1789 is the starting point ofmodern times, because men of that period wished, among other things, tooverthrow the principle of divine right.” “To traditional tyrannicide,” there-fore, they added “the concept of calculated deicide.” The attempt on theperson of Louis XVI in 1793 was “aimed at the King-Christ, the incarnationof the divinity, and not at the craven flesh of a mere man.” The regicide was,in effect, “the murder of the King-priest” and it stands, he went on,

Epilogue

161

at the crux of our contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularizationof our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God. Up to nowGod played a part in history through the medium of kings. But His repre-sentative in history has been killed, for there is no longer a king. Thereforethere is nothing but a semblance of God, relegated to the heaven ofprinciple.

Epilogue

162

Figure 8 The Papacy. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani places the triple crown on PopePaul VI’s head during an outdoor coronation ceremony in St Peter’s Square, June 30,1963. The beehive-shaped tiara, 15 inches high and weighing close to 10 pounds, is madeof cloth-of-silver; three gold coronets studded with jewels ring it and a small cross risesfrom the top. (TopFoto)

Deploring the regicide, then, as the removal from the scene of “the divineemissary in charge of human affairs,” and mourning the concomitant loss ofa universal norm of justice linked with the divine, Camus was led to concludethat with that murderous act “the revolutionaries dealt a terrible blow toChristianity.”3

The claim is an arresting one, almost as arresting as the event itself. Thatevent, it should be conceded, is one of great singularity and complexity, andone that has not readily yielded its meaning to those who have attempted toconstrue it. But if any rectitude attaches to the case I have been making forthe ultimately biblical wellspring of the desacralizing process, then a funda-mental irony attends upon that regicidal event. And it is an irony that appearswholly to have eluded Camus. Louis XVI’s execution and the events thatunfolded in its train did indeed deal a great blow to the “throne and altar”Catholicism of the French ancien régime. But the more devastating blow,surely, was the coup de grâce that the slow seepage of Christian belief into thepopular consciousness had finally succeeded in delivering to the “anthropo-logical and historical truism” that “kings are sacred” and to humankind’smillennial yearning for a kingship anchored in the divine.

Epilogue

163

Prologue

1 Michael Oakeshott ed., The Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Basil Black-well, 1946), Introduction, p. x.

2 Thus, Michelle Gilbert, “The Person of the King: Ritual and Power in a Ghana-ian State,” in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies,eds. David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987), pp. 298–330 (at p. 298).

3 Roger Mousnier, Monarchies et royautés de la préhistoire à nos jours (Paris:Librairie Académique Perrin, 1989), pp. 10–11.

4 John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (New York and London: HarperTorchbooks, [1896] 1965), p. 1.

5 Thus one could read George H. Sabine’s influential textbook, A History of Polit-ical Thought, 3rd edn. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1953) – whichwent through multiple editions and reprintings in subsequent decades, andwhich was widely read by generations of students in the anglophone world –without realizing that Aristotle thought that “the cult of the gods should be amatter for citizens,” and that “the directors of the state include priests as well asmagistrates.” See Politics, VII, ix, §9 and xii, §6; trans. Ernest Barker, The Politicsof Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), pp. 303 and 310.

6 The words quoted are those of Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victo-rian Britain (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 7–8.“Across the Western world,” he adds, “Victorian authors and readers were deter-mined to find the Greeks as much as possible like themselves and to rationalizeaway fundamental differences.”

7 For Ullmann’s position and the numerous works in which he developed it, alongwith a critical appraisal of what it involves, see Francis Oakley, “Celestial Hierar-chies Revisited: Walter Ullmann’s Vision of Medieval Politics,” in Oakley, Politicsand Eternity: Studies in the History of Medieval and Early Modern PoliticalThought (Leiden, Boston, Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1999), pp. 25–72.

Notes

164

8 Thus, in order of citation (all italics mine), Sabine, History of Political Thought,p. 159; Francis Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy:Origins and Background, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center forByzantine Studies, 1966), vol. 2, p. 488; Christopher Morris, Western PoliticalThought: I Plato to Aristotle (New York: Basic Books, 1967), p. 166; C.H. McIl-wain, Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York: Macmillan, 1932),p. 146; John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (New York: Harperand Row, 1962), pp. 10–11. Cf. among more recent works, Joseph Canning, AHistory of Medieval Political Thought 300–1450 (London and New York: Rout-ledge, 1996), pp. 127–8.

9 Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, trans. Willard Small(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), first published in 1864. Cf.W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle (New York:Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 3–4, where, acknowledging the indebtedness ofmodern classicists to anthropological studies, he remarks of the Greeks that theyremain “in many respects a remarkably foreign people, and to get inside theirminds . . . means unthinking much that has become part and parcel of ourmental equipment so that we carry it about with us unquestioningly and for themost part unconsciously.”

10 Christopher Dawson, Religion and Culture (New York: AMS Press, 1981),p. 116.

11 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969); Marcel Gauchet, The Dis-enchantment of the World, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997); Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca d’Isanto(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

1 Gate of the Gods

1 For these examples, see Harold Nicolson, Kings, Courts and Monarchy (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 55; Henri J.M. Claessen and Peter Skalnikeds., The Early State (The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton Publishers, 1978),p. 165; A.M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the ComparativeAnatomy of Human Society, ed. Rodney Needham (Chicago and London: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 165; C.M. Frähn, Ibn Fozhans und andererAraber Berichte über die Russen Alterer Zeit: Text und Übersetzung (St Peters-burg, 1823), pp. 21–2; H. Munro Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 367.

2 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 13.

3 Thus H.P. L’Orange, “Expressions of Cosmic Kingship in the Ancient World,”in The Sacral Kingship: Contributions to the Central Theme of the VIIIth Inter-national Congress for the History of Religions (Rome, April, 1955) (Leiden:E.J. Brill, 1959), pp. 481–92; idem, Studies in the Iconography of Cosmic King-ship in the Ancient World (New York: Caratzas Brothers, 1982), esp. pp. 103–9;Chadwick, The Heroic Age, p. 368; Walter Schlesinger, “Über germanisches

Notes

165

Heerkönigtum,” in Das Königtum: Seine geistigen und rechtlichen Grundlagen,ed. T. Mayer (Lindau u. Konstanz: J. Thorbeke, 1956), pp. 105–41 (at p. 134);J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in FrankishHistory (London: Methuen, 1962), p. 158: idem, Early Germanic Kingship inEngland and on the Continent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 6–7, 19.

4 As, for example, the situation in ancient India, where the sacral character of theking was not in doubt, nor his responsibility for rainfall and the general well-being of his people – see John H. Spellman, Political Theory of Ancient India: AStudy of Kingship from the Earliest Times to circa AD 300 (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1964). Speaking, however, of “the ambiguity of the king–brahminrelationship,” Heesterman has insisted upon the lack in the Vedic ritual texts ofany “unified view of kingship” or “consistent overall scheme that would givesubstance to a consolidated theory of sacral kingship” – J.C. Heesterman, TheInner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 111 and 142.

5 Insofar, that is, as causality is taken to function in a mechanical, impersonalfashion.

6 Henri Frankfort, John A. Wilson and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: TheIntellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1949),p. 237.

7 Ibid., p. 238.8 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York:

Harper and Row, 1959), p. 36.9 Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Near Eastern Religion as the

Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948),p. 3.

10 Arend T. Van Leeuwen, Christianity in World History: The Meeting of the Faithsof East and West, trans. H.H. Hoskins (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,1965), pp. 168–70.

11 Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, trans. H.H. Gerth(Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, 1959), pp. 261–2, n. 63. No isolated inci-dent. Weber comments also that “as late as 1832 rain . . . [had] . . . followed thepublic confession of the emperor.”

12 Van Leeuwen, Christianity in World History, p. 170.13 Thus John W. Perry, Lord of the Four Quarters: Myths of the Royal Father (New

York: George Braziller, 1966), pp. 5, 26. Cf. Edmond Rochedieu, “Le Caractèresacré de souveraineté à la lumière de la psychologie collective,” in The SacralKingship, 48–53.

14 D.C. Holtom, The Japanese Enthronement Ceremonies, with an Account of theImperial Regalia, 2nd edn. (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1972), pp. 2–3.

15 The words are those of T. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry inModern Japan (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,1996), p. 248, n. 7.

16 For the Victorian “reinvention” of the British monarchy, see David Cannadine,“The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy andthe ‘Invention of Tradition,’ c.1820–1977,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds.

Notes

166

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1983), pp. 101–64. For the Meiji parallel in Japan, Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy,esp. pp. 1–28, 230–45.

17 I depend here on the detailed account in Holtom, The Japanese EnthronementCeremonies.

18 See Steven R. Weisman, “Akihito Performs his Solitary Rite,” New York Times,November 23, 1990, A7.

19 Thus Holtom’s interpretation, The Japanese Enthronement Ceremony, pp. 114–16.He also notes, however, that “the fact that the food offering is placed on a matthat is turned in the direction of Ise [where the Sacred Regalian Mirror isenshrined] may be legitimately interpreted as a special expression of thanksgivingto Amaterasu-o--mikami,” and in 1990, certainly, some Japanese speculated thatthe ceremony involved a sort of symbolic sexual coupling with the sun-goddess –for which, see Weisman, “Akihito performs his solitary rite,” A7.

20 Certainly, it was not to the people but “to the first ancestors of the imperial line”that the Meiji emperor pledged to uphold the constitution of 1889, and thatoath he repeated to his imperial ancestors and followed up by an act of worshipto the national deities. Thus Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, pp. 107–8. He alsonotes (pp. 237–8) that in 1946 the emperor followed up his proclamation of thenew constitution by reporting that fact “to the national gods in the palace’sInner Sanctuary.”

21 Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples (Madison, WI:University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), p. 242; idem, “The Kuba State,” in TheEarly State, eds. Henri J.M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik (The Hague, Paris, NewYork: Mouton Publishers, 1978), 359–79 (at 378). I base my remarks on thesetwo works of Vansina as well as on Joseph Cornet, Art royal Kuba (Milan: Edi-zioni Sipiel, 1982).

22 “Surplus did not make the state. Rather the reverse” – thus Vansina, “The KubaState,” 378; cf. idem, The Children of Woot, ch. 10, and esp. pp. 194–6.

23 Vansina, The Children of Woot, p. 207.24 Vansina, “The Kuba State,” p. 365.25 Michael D. Coe, The Maya, 5th edn. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993),

p. 190. I base what I have to say in this section largely on Coe’s standard work, aswell as on Linda Schele and David Freidel, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story ofthe Ancient Maya (New York: William Morrow, 1990) and David Carrasco,Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers (ProspectHeights, IL: Waveland Pres, 1990).

26 Schele and Freidel, A Forest of Kings, p. 98; cf. pp. 57, 120; Carrasco, Religionsof Mesoamerica, p. 40. I would note that the use of the word “supernatural,”however understandable, is both anachronistic and inappropriate in relation to apeople to whom the biblically inspired distinction between “nature” and “super-nature” would probably have been utterly incomprehensible.

27 Schele and Freidel, A Forest of Kings, p. 129.28 Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica, pp. 29, 35–6.29 Schele and Freidel, A Forest of Kings, p. 90.30 Though Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica, ch. 4 (“Maya Religion: Cosmic

Notes

167

Trees, Sacred Kings, and the Underworld”), pp. 92–123, gives an admirably suc-cinct and coherent description.

31 Schele and Freidel, A Forest of Kings, pp. 103–16 (at p. 116).32 Ibid., pp. 217–19.33 Ibid., pp. 225–6.34 D.A. Binchy, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1970), p. 14. In what follows I rely on Binchy as well as Maartje Draak, “SomeAspects of Kingship in Pagan Ireland,” in The Sacral Kingship, pp. 651–63; Pri-onsias MacCana, Celtic Mythology, rev. edn. (New York: Peter Bendrick Books,1983); J.A. MacCulloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts (Edinburgh: T. andT. Clark, 1911).

35 MacCana, Celtic Mythology, p. 117.36 Similarly, the failure of his powers in any of these areas, or the impairment of his

body, might necessitate his abdication or deposition – thus Draak, “SomeAspects of Kingship in Pagan Ireland,” pp. 660–3.

37 Thus, according to Binchy (p. 24), “we are entitled to speak of a ‘CommonCeltic’ type of kingship.” Cf. MacCulloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts,pp. 159–60.

38 Ake V. Ström, “The King God and His Connection with Sacrifice in the OldNorse Religion,” in The Sacral Kingship, p. 702; cf. E.O.G. Turville-Petrie, Mythand Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia (New York: Holt,Rinehart and Winston, 1964), esp. ch. 9, pp. 190–5. In light of the critical viewssince expressed by Walter Baetke, Yngvi und die Ynglinger: Eine quellenkritischeUntersuchung über das nordische “Sakralkönigtum” (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,1964), the confidence evident in Ström’s judgment now seems to have been alittle premature.

39 Ström, “The King God and His Connection with Sacrifice,” pp. 714–15.40 Otto Höfler, “Der Sakralcharakter des germanischen Königtums,” in The Sacral

Kingship, p. 681.41 A.M. Hocart, Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of

Human Society, ed. Rodney Needham (Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press, 1970), p. 12.

42 William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, 3rd edn. (3 vols.,Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880), vol. 1, pp. 2, 231, 233.

43 See Baetke, Yngvi und dei Ynglinger, pp. 8–10, 171ff., for a particularly bluntstatement of this position.

44 H.G. Güterbock, “Authority and Law in the Hittite Kingdom,” Supplement tothe Journal of the American Oriental Society, no. 17 (July–Sept., 1956), 19;O.R. Gurney, “Hittite Kingship,” in S.H. Hooke ed., Myth, Ritual and King-ship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 115, 121.

45 Chadwick, The Heroic Age, p. 368; Höfler, “Der Sakralcharakter des germanis-chen Königtums,” pp. 694–6; Schlesinger, “Über germanisches Heerkönig-tum,” pp. 105–41 (at p. 140).

46 Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae, xxviii, 5, 14; ed. and trans. John C. Rolfe,Ammianus Marcellinus, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1935), 3:168–9; cf. Schlesinger, “Über germanisches Heerkönigtum,” p. 135.

Notes

168

47 Höfler, “Der Sakralcharakter des germanischen Königtums,” pp. 700–1.48 Procopius, De bello gothico, II, 14:34–42, and 15:27–36, in Procopius, The

History of the Wars, ed. and trans. H.B. Dewing, 3 vols. (London: Loeb ClassicalLibrary, 1919), vol. 3, pp. 413, 420, 424.

49 Thus Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, p. 251.50 Henri Frankfort, Egyptian Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1948),

pp. 42–3. idem, Kingship and the Gods, p. 5.51 Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, p. 51; Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy, p. 89.52 Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy, pp. 214–15.53 Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, pp. 150–1.

2 Royal Saviors and Shepherds

1 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York:Harper and Row, 1959), p. 34.

2 E.O. James, The Ancient Gods: The History and Diffusion of Religion in theAncient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean (London: Weidenfeld andNicolson, 1960), pp. 129–33; Arne Furnmark, “Was there a Sacred Kingship inMinoan Crete?,” in The Sacral Kingship: Contributions to the Central Theme ofthe VIIIth International Congress for the History of Religions, Rome, April, 1955(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1959), pp. 369–70. Partial dissent in H.S. Rose, “The Evi-dence for Divine Kings in Greece,” ibid., pp. 372–8, though it should be notedthat Rose is concerned to reject the presence in the Greek world not of sacred orsacerdotal monarchs but only of divine kings “of the kind made famous by[Frazer’s] The Golden Bough.”

3 Francis Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins andBackground, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for ByzantineStudies, 1966), vol. 1, p. 155.

4 The words cited are from Plato, The Statesman, §290E; in The Collected Dia-logues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 1059, and from Dvornik, Early Christianand Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 1, p. 155.

5 Aristotle on the Constitution of Athens, §§57 and 3; trans. E. Poste (London:Macmillan, 1891), pp. 92 and 4; James, The Ancient Gods, p. 133.

6 James, The Ancient Gods, p. 133.7 Such is the case made with extensive documentation by Dvornik, Early Christian

and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 207–21.8 Citing the translation given by E.B. Goodenough, “The Political Philosophy of

Hellenistic Kingship,” Yale Classical Studies, 1 (1928), 55–102 (at 68 and 91).9 Ibid., esp. pp. 91 and 100–2; Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political

Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 205–77.10 Cicero, Ad Quintum fratrem, 1:9, 26; in Letters to his Friends, ed. W.G. Williams,

3 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1927–9), vol. 3, pp. 414ff.11 Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Galaxy

Books, 1957), pp. 110–13 (first published in 1940).12 Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 484;

Notes

169

M. Hammond, “Hellenistic Influences on the Structure of the Augustan Princi-pate,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 17 (1940), 1–25 (esp.pp. 3–13).

13 Thus Simon Price, “From Noble Funerals to Divine Cult: The Consecration ofthe Roman Emperors,” in David Cannadine and Simon Price eds., Rituals ofRoyalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987), pp. 56–105 (at 57 and 103); also Simon Price, Ritualsand Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1984), especially his helpful concluding reflections on “Rituals,Politics and Power” (pp. 234–48). Cf. Sabine G. MacCormack, Art and Cere-mony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of CaliforniaPress, 1981), pp. 93–115. Cf. Robert Graves, I, Claudius (London: Penguin,1953), p. 164.

14 H.W. Pleket, “An Aspect of the Emperor Cult: Imperial Mysteries,” HarvardTheological Review, 58 (Dec., 1965), 331–47; similarly Price, “From NobleFunerals to Divine Cult,” pp. 56–105.

15 E.g. S.H. Hooke, A.R. Johnson, M. Engnell, G. Widengren. For a useful accountof the development and unfolding of the “myth and ritual” approach, Hooke’searlier volumes – Myth and Ritual (1933) and The Labyrinth (1935), as well asaffinities with the work of scholars like A.M. Hocart and Sigmund Mowinckel, seehis, “Myth and Ritual: Past and Present,” in Myth, Ritual and Kingship: Essays onthe Theory and Practice of Kingship in the Ancient Near East and in Israel, ed.S.H. Hooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 1–21. For a critical appraisal of theschool, see S.G.F. Brandon, “The Myth and Ritual Position Critically Consid-ered,” ibid., 261–91.

16 Isaiah 9:6–7, 11:3–5, 42:1–7; cf. Jeremiah 23:5–6, 33:15–16; see the discussionof these texts in Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy,vol. 1, pp. 335–9.

17 Isaiah 42:1–7, 49:1–9, 50:4–9, 52:13–15, 53:1–12; cf. the discussion inDvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 339–47,and the literature referred to therein, especially C.J. Gadd, “Babylonian Mythand Ritual,” in Myth and Ritual, ed. Hooke, pp. 40–67, which summarizes theunfolding of the New Year Festival’s ritual of atonement.

18 Thus Eric Voegelin, Order and History: I Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge,LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), p. 282. The discovery is associatedespecially with the names of Hermann Gunkel and Sigmund Mowinckel. For ahelpful account of the development of Old Testament scholarship on this wholematter, see A.R. Johnson, “Hebrew Conceptions of Kingship,” in Myth, Ritualand Kingship, ed. Hooke, pp. 204–35.

19 The words quoted are those of Johnson, “Hebrew Conceptions of Kingship,”p. 222, and Sigmund Mowinckel, Psalmenstudien, 6 vols. (Kristiania: J. Dybwad,1922), vol. 2, p. 301.

20 As long ago as 1932 C.R. North pointed out that in the Hebrew it need meanno more than “Thy throne is [everlasting] like that of God” – “The ReligiousAspects of Hebrew Kingship,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentisch Wissenschaft, 1(1932), 8–38 (at pp. 29–30).

Notes

170

21 The words cited are drawn from North, “The Religious Aspects of HebrewKingship,” p. 35, and Sigmund Mowinckel, “General Oriental and SpecificIsraelite Elements in the Israelite Conception of the Sacral Kingdom,” in TheSacral Kingship, pp. 283–93 (at p. 286).

22 The words are those of G. von Rad and E.A. Speiser, cited from Creation: TheImpact of an Idea, eds. Daniel O’Connor and Francis Oakley (New York: Scrib-ner’s Sons, 1969), p. 6. The essays gathered together in the book provide anintroductory discussion of the philosophical significance of the biblical doctrineof creation, of the underlying conception of God that it presupposes, and of itsimpact upon later thinking about man and nature.

23 Mowinckel, “General Oriental and Specific Israelite Elements,” p. 290.24 “It is true that the explicit term ‘the kingdom of God,’ is not found in the Old

Testament or in Jewish literature outside the New Testament. . . . But the idea isthere, nevertheless, at least in its major aspects” – thus F.C. Grant, “The Idea ofthe Kingdom of God in the New Testament,” in The Sacral Kingship, pp. 439–46(at pp. 440–1). Cf. the discussion in Dvornik, Early Christian and ByzantinePolitical Philosophy, vol. 1, pp. 311–402.

25 See Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 1,pp. 396–402.

26 I follow here Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 1,pp. 278–402, cf. Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 1, pp. 488–515.

27 Grant, “The Idea of the Kingdom of God in the New Testament,” p. 445.28 Hans Küng, The Church, trans. Ray and Rosaleen Ockenden (New York: Sheed

and Ward, 1967), p. 87.29 E.g., in relation to the royal title of “savior,” Paul’s epistles to Timothy and Titus

may be read as a direct attack on the Hellenistic divinization of kings. For Christalone is the Savior, the “one mediator . . . between God and men,” (1 Timothy2:1–6; Titus 3:1–8). Per Beskow, Rex Gloriae: The Kingship of Christ in the EarlyChurch, trans. Eric J. Sharpe (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1962), pp. 71–3,suggests, however, that what is involved in these texts is less a polemic directedagainst Hellenistic royal claims than simply “a case of borrowing” throughcontact with the Hellenistic Judaism of the Diaspora.

30 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 4:8; in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, TheSocial Contract and Discourses (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1947), pp. 106–15(at p. 108). Numa D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, trans. WillardSmall, 12th edn. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), pp. 393–4.

31 John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11; 1 John 5:18–19; and esp. Revelation 13, whereRome is represented as a beast deriving its authority from Satan and demandingworship from its subjects under penalty of death. See L. Cerfaux, “Le Conflitentre Dieu et le Souverain divinisé dans l’Apocalypse de Jean,” The Sacral King-ship, pp. 459–70.

32 For the importance of the Persian inheritance, see Aziz Al-Azmeh, MuslimKingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities(London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1997); Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Six Cen-turies of Islamic Political Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004),pp. 148–64.

Notes

171

33 Cited from Gavin R.G. Hambly, “The Pahlavı- Autocracy: Muhammad Riza-

Sha-h,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, eds. Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly,Charles Melville, et al., 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1968–91), vol. 7, p. 285. Such reservations had not prevented the rulers of theOttoman empire (c.1290–1922) from adopting the Persian title of “emperor,”portraying themselves as the heirs of Darius and Alexander, or styling them-selves “king of kings” (malik-al-muluk). See Antony Black, The History ofIslamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present (New York: Routledge,2001), p. 205. For the early antipathy towards kingship, see Crone, God’s Rule,pp. 7, 148–64.

34 In their attempt to condemn the rule of the Umayyad caliphs, their Abba-sid rivalshad condemned the use of the title malik (king) and the term mulk (kingship).But malik had earlier been viewed as perfectly acceptable and used as a synonymfor caliph. See H. Ringgren, “Some Religious Aspects of the Caliphate,” in TheSacral Kingship, pp. 737–48 (at p. 738).

35 Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, pp. 63–5. Al-Azmeh adds (p. 63): “It is nowanachronistic to presume that the Rightly-Guided caliphate (632–61), the prim-itive proto-Muslim polity at Medina and later briefly at Ku-fa, had producedstatutes and forms of state and of kingship of any determinative or definitivecharacter that informed the later crystallization of Muslim politics. The Muslimreligion and the texts and exemplary geneaologies that are ascribed to the forma-tive period of Islam were later elaborations created over many generations in thelight of conditions prevailing in polities the Arabs set up from Iraq and Syria.Elements derived from the slight Arab tradition of kingship, heavily impregnatedby Byzantine and Iranian paradigms, were combined with the enduring heritageof Semitic religion, priesthood, and kingship.”

36 Cited from Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought, p. 162.37 On the Sharı-’a, Erwin I.J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam: An

Introductory Outline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 8,comments: “A Muslim’s life – ideally at least – is ruled in its entirety by theSharı-’a, which lays down precise rules and regulations governing his relationswith God as well as with his fellow-Muslims and non-Muslims. We are used toterm the former ‘religious’ and the latter ‘secular.’ But where a religious law isall-comprehensive this distinction falls to the ground.”

38 Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam, pp. 26, 8–9. Cf. Crone, God’sRule, pp. 10–16, 389–90, 393–8; Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought,pp. 11–14; cf. Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, p. 15. It should be noted, however,that under the de facto rule of sultans, an essentially secular title (sultan =power), there developed in practice a quasi-separation between the secular andthe religious. For the periodic emergence in Islam (theoretical formulations tothe contrary) of such a de facto institutional separation of the “political” and the“religious,” see Ira M. Lapidus, “State and Religion in Islamic Societies,” Pastand Present 151 (1996), 3–27.

39 Ringgren, “Some Religious Aspects of the Caliphate,” pp. 738, 740, 746; cf.Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, pp. 78–9, 156–7.

40 Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought, pp. 39–48 (at pp. 40–1).

Notes

172

41 Ibid., pp. 222–37.42 Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, pp. 158–62.43 Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, Part 4, ch. 45; ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1946), pp. 430–1 and 435.

3 The Eusebian Accommodation

1 Francis Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins andBackground, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for ByzantineStudies, 1966), vol. 2. pp. 558–65 (at 565). Cf. Erwin R. Goodenough, ThePolitics of Philo Judaeus: Practice and Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1938), pp. 1–120, and Per Beskow, Rex Gloriae: The Kingship of Christ inthe Early Church, trans. Eric J. Sharpe (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1962),esp. pp. 187–211.

2 Beskow, Rex Gloriae, p. 188.3 This statement occurs in a fragment from one of Philo’s last works that is quoted

in a twelfth-century source. I cite it from Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzan-tine Political Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 563.

4 Beskow, Rex Gloriae, p. 188.5 Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 2, pp. 594–615

(at p. 597).6 Thus Norman H. Baynes, “Eusebius and the Christian Empire,” in Mélanges

Bidez, Annuaire de l’Institute de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientale, 2 (Brussels:1934), pp. 13–18.

7 George H. Williams, “Christology and Church–State Relations in the FourthCentury,” Church History 20, 3 (1951), 3–33 (at p. 14), 4 (1951), 3–26. Cf.F. Edward Cranz, “Kingdom and Polity in Eusebius of Caesarea,” HarvardTheological Review 45, 1, 1952), 47–65. My references will be given to theEnglish translations of the Oration and Life printed in Philip Schaff ed., SelectLibrary of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, 2nd series 14 vols. (New York: TheChristian Literature Co., 1886–90), vol. 1, pp. 481–559 (Life), pp. 581–610(Oration); and W.J. Ferrar, The Proof of the Gospel: Being the Demonstratio Evan-gelica of Eusebius of Caesarea, 2 vols. (London: Society for Promoting ChristianKnowledge, 1920). The problem of the alleged non-Eusebian interpolations inthe Life need not concern us here.

8 Oration, ch. 16, p. 606.9 Ibid., ch. 13, pp. 602–3; ch. 16, pp. 606–7; Proof of the Gospel, Bk. 3, ch. 7, in

Ferrar, vol. 1, p. 161.10 Oration, ch. 16, pp. 606–7.11 Proof of the Gospel, Bk. 8, ch. 3, in Ferrar, vol. 2, pp. 140–1.12 Life, Bk. 1, ch. 44, p. 494.13 What is involved here is more than Constantine’s vision before the battle of the

Milvian bridge, the account of which in the Life, Bk. 1, chs. 28–9, p. 490, somehave maintained, is not the work of Eusebius. See also Oration, ch. 11, p. 595,and ch. 18, p. 610.

14 Life, Bk. 1, ch. 12, p. 485, ch. 20, p. 488, chs. 38 and 39, pp. 492–3.

Notes

173

15 Life, Bk. 3, ch. 15, pp. 523–4; cf. the comment of Williams, “Christology andChurch–State Relations (i),” 5.

16 Oration, ch. 6, p. 591; cf. the comment of H. Berkhof cited in Cranz, “Kingdomand Polity,” 56 n. 46.

17 Oration, ch. 11, pp. 596–7; cf. ch. 12, p. 598. For pertinent commentary onEusebius’s use of Philo’s “political metaphysics,” see Dvornik, Early Christianand Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 621; Beskow, Rex Gloriae, esp.pp. 261–7, 318–19.

18 Oration, chs. 13–15, pp. 603–6.19 Ibid., chs. 1, p. 583, 3, p. 585, 11, pp. 595–8, 12, p. 600.20 Ibid., ch. 1, p. 583, chs. 4–5, pp. 585–6.21 Ibid., ch. 2, pp. 583–4; cf. Life, Bk. 4, ch. 65, p. 557.22 Williams, “Christology and Church–State Relations (i),” 4.23 Beskow, Rex Gloriae, p. 319; cf. Williams, “Christology and Church–State Rela-

tions (ii),” 15–16.24 Life, Bk. 3, ch. 15, pp. 523–4.25 Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 2, pp. 672–99,

731–95.26 Ibid., pp. 772–8.27 I cite the translation reprinted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State:

1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 14–15;cf. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 2,pp. 804–9.

28 Translation in Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, p. 13.29 Francis Dvornik, “Pope Gelasius and Emperor Anastasius I,” Byzantinische

Zeitschrift 44 (1951), 111–16.30 Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy , vol. 2, pp. 809ff.31 Cited from D.M. Nichols, “Byzantine Political Thought,” in The Cambridge

History of Medieval Political Thought c. 310–c.1450, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 51–72 (at p. 71).

32 For this distinction between the potestas ordinis and potestas jurisdictionis as wellas its history and the literature pertaining to it, see Dictionnaire de droit canon-ique, 7 vols. (Paris: Letourzey et Ané, 1935–65), vol. 8, pp. 98–100, s.v.“Pouvoirs de l’église.”

33 I draw this descriptive phrase from Ernest Barker, Social and Political Thought inByzantium: From Justinian I to the last Palaeologus (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1957), p. 12.

34 Baynes, “Eusebius and the Christian Empire,” 13; cf. Nichols, “Byzantine Polit-ical Thought.”

35 Corpus Juris Civilis, eds. W. Kroll, P. Krueger, T. Mommsen and R. Schoell,3 vols. (Berlin: Weidman, 1899–1902), vol. 3, p. 53 (Novellae, 7, 2, 1); I cite theEnglish translation in Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Phil-osophy, vol. 2, p. 816.

36 Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 2, pp. 640ff.;André Grabar, L’Empéreur dans l’art byzantin (London: Variorums Reprints,1971), pp. 90–6.

Notes

174

37 Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 643; Euse-bius, Life of Constantine, Bk. 4, chs. 8–13, pp. 542–4.

38 I cite the translation in Barker, Social and Political Thought in Byzantium,pp. 194–5.

39 I cite the article from Thornton Anderson, Russian Political Thought: An Intro-duction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 129.

40 Ibid., p. 82.41 Arnold J. Toynbee, “Russia’s Byzantine Heritage,” in Toynbee, Civilization on

Trial (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 182–3.42 Dmitri Obolensky, “Russia’s Byzantine Heritage,” in Oxford Slavonic Papers, 1

(1950), 37–63 (at 59); cf. B.H. Summers, Peter the Great (New York: CollierBooks, 1962), pp. 129–31.

43 Michael Cherniavsky, “Khan or Basileus: An Aspect of Russian Medieval PoliticalTheory,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, 4 (1959), 456–76 (at 462–6, 468,471, 473, 476).

44 Anderson, Russian Political Thought, pp. 28–9; cf. Francis Dvornik, “ByzantinePolitical Ideas in Kievan Russia,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 9 and 10 (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 71–121.

45 Anderson, Russian Political Thought, pp. 36–7.46 Ibid., pp. 173–88 (quotations from p. 174).

4 The Carolingian Accommodation

1 St Augustine, De civitate dei, 19:17; trans. Henry Bettenson, as Augustine, Con-cerning the City of God against the Pagans, ed. David Knowles (Harmondsworth,Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 877.

2 Augustine, De civitate dei, 5:24 in Bettenson, pp. 219–20.3 Thus Francis Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy:

Origins and Background, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center forByzantine Studies, 1966), vol. 2, p. 849; Walter Ullmann, The CarolingianRenaissance and the Idea of Kingship (London: Methuen and Co., 1969), p. 3.

4 In this connection the instructions sent in 601 by Pope Gregory to the Benedic-tine missionaries in England are revealing: “[W]hen by God’s help you reach ourmost revered brother, Bishop Augustine, we wish you to inform him that wehave been giving careful thought to the affairs of the English, and have come tothe conclusion that the temples of the idols in that country should on no accountbe destroyed. He is to destroy the idols, but the temples themselves are to beaspersed with holy water, altars set up, and relics enclosed in them. For if thesetemples are well built, they are to be purified from devil-worship, and dedicatedto the service of the true God. In this way, we hope that the people, seeing thatits temples are not destroyed, may abandon idolatry and resort to these places asbefore, and may come to know and adore the true God. And since they have acustom of sacrificing many oxen to devils, let some other solemnity be substi-tuted in its place, such as a day of Dedication or the Festivals of the holy martyrswhose relics are enshrined there. . . . For it is certainly impossible to eradicate allerrors from obstinate minds at one stroke, and whoever wishes to climb to a

Notes

175

mountain top climbs gradually step by step, and not in one leap. It was in thisway that God revealed himself to the Israelite people in Egypt, permitting thesacrifices formerly offered to the Devil to be offered thenceforward to Himselfinstead.” (Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, 1:30: trans. Leo Shirley-Price as A History of the English Church and People (Baltimore, MD: PenguinBooks, 1965), pp. 85–7.

5 Confessions, 6:2; trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1961),pp. 112–13.

6 Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribuéà la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Strasburg:Librairie Istra, 1924), pp. 76–7.

7 Cited in K.J. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: OttonianSaxony (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 80 and n. 23.

8 See the excellent analysis of the state of scholarly play on the matter in GáborKlaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval CentralEurope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 1–113; and fora powerful version of the case to be made for pagan–Christian continuity in one(perhaps exceptional) region, see William A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship inAnglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity (Manches-ter: Manchester University Press, 1970).

9 Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges, pp. 60–1, n. 1; cf. Tacitus, Germania, ch. 40; inTacitus on Britain and Germany, trans. H. Mattingly (West Drayton, Middlesex:Penguin Books, 1948), pp. 133–4.

10 The term used by J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, “The Via Regia of the CarolingianAge,” in Trends in Medieval Political Thought, ed. Beryl Smalley (Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1965), p. 28, where he adds that Charles the Bald, later on, “believed,by having his queen Irmintrud crowned and anointed in 866, she would againbecome fruitful and give him better children than the bad lot he already had.”

11 Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges, p. 66.12 Ernst Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and

Medieval Ruler Worship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1946), p. 56.

13 P.D. King, “The Barbarian Kingdoms,” in The Cambridge History of MedievalPolitical Thought c.350–c.1450, J.H. Burns ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1988), pp. 123–53 (at p. 128).

14 Ullmann, The Carolingian Renaissance, pp. 98–9, 135.15 H.-X. Arquillière, L’Augustinisme politique, 2nd edn. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955),

p. 166.16 Ambrosiaster/Pseudo Augustine, Quaestiones Veteris et Novi Testament, 35; the

text is conveniently reproduced in R.W. and A.J. Carlyle, A History of MediaevalPolitical Theory in the West, 6 vols. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwoodand Sons, 1903–36), vol. 1, p. 149 n. 2.

17 Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges, pp. 74–5; Kantorowicz, Laudes regiae, p. 57.18 Cited from Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, trans. S.B. Chrimes

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), p. 38; Wido’s words are cited from Bloch, LesRois thaumaturges, p. 189.

Notes

176

19 The text is reproduced in Carlyle and Carlyle, History of Mediaeval PoliticalTheory, vol. 1, p. 215 n. 3.

20 English translation of the text in Theodor E. Mommsen and Karl F. Morrison,Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century (New York and London:Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 67.

21 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval PoliticalTheology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 61–78 (atpp. 64–5). Kantorowicz dates the miniature to c.975 and identifies the emperorin question as Otto II; Domkapitel Aachen, however, which supplied the imagefor Figure 6, dates the Gospel Book to c.996 and identifies the emperordepicted, pace Kantorowicz, as Otto III.

22 Ibid., p. 61.23 Following here George H. Williams, The Norman Anonymous of 1100 AD

Toward the Identification and Evaluation of the So-Called Anonymous of York(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 128–32.

24 Ibid., p. 132; cf. p. 190.25 De consecratione pontificum et regum; printed in Monumenta Germaniae Histor-

ica, Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum, 3 vols. (Hanover, 1891–7), vol. 3,662–79 (at 662–8); I cite the English translation in Ewart Lewis, Medieval Politi-cal Ideas, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), vol. 2, pp. 562–6.

26 De consecratione; in MGH, Libelli de lite, vol. 3, pp. 664–7, 678.27 Williams, The Norman Anonymous of 1100 AD, pp. 169–74.28 De consecratione; in MGH, Libelli de lite, vol. 3, pp. 663–8; much of this crucial

section is translated in Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas, vol. 2, pp. 563–6.29 Williams, The Norman Anonymous of 1100 A.D., pp. 187–8.30 Ibid., pp. 170–3, 192–5, 156–7, where the pertinent texts are cited.31 Ibid., pp. 77 and 10.

5 The Sacrality of Kingship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

1 Janet Nelson, “Kingship and Empire,” in The Cambridge History of MedievalPolitical Thought c. 310–c.1450, J.H. Burns ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1988), pp. 211–51 (at p. 220).

2 Thus Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, §33; in Einhard and Notker the Stammerer:Two Lives of Charlemagne, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, Middlessex:Penguin Books, 1969), p. 88.

3 Robert Folz, The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Four-teenth Century, trans. Sheila Ann Ogilvie (New York and Evanston, IL: Harperand Row, 1969), p. 64.

4 Karl F. Morrison, “Introduction” to Imperial Lives and Letters of the EleventhCentury, trans. and ed. Theodor E. Mommsen and Karl F. Morrison (New York:Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 26.

5 Thus Folz, Concept of Empire, p. 11.6 In the encyclical letter Eger Cui Levia (c.1246); English translation in Brian

Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State: 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 147–9.

Notes

177

7 I.S. Robinson, “Church and Papacy,” in Cambridge History of Medieval PoliticalThought, pp. 252–305 (at pp. 265–6).

8 Humbert, Libri III Adversus Simoniacos (1054–8); Letter of Gregory to BishopHermann of Metz (March, 1081); Manegoldi ad Gebehardum Liber (1080–5) –I cite the translations printed in Tierney, Crisis of Church and State, pp. 40–1,66–73, 78–80.

9 All such modifications embedded in the ordo for imperial unction used from thetime of Otto IV (1198–1215) to that of Charles V (1519–56), the last emperorto be anointed. See Folz, Concept of Empire, pp. 87–9 and 199.

10 Letter of Gregory to Bishop Hermann of Metz (March, 1081); Dictatus papae(1075), §§27 and 12; both cited from Tierney, Crisis of Church and State,pp. 69, 50, 49.

11 H.-X. Arquillière, Le Plus ancien traité de l’église: Jacques de Viterbe, De regiminechristiano (1301–1302) (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1926); Joseph de Maistre, DuPape (1819), eds. Jacques Lovie and Joannes Chétail (Geneva: Librairie Droz,1966); idem, L’Église gallicane dans sa rapport avec le saint-siège (Lyons:Librairie Catholique E. Vitte, 1931).

12 See the pertinent text and extended commentary in New Commentary on theCode of Canon Law, John P. Beal, James A. Coriden, Thomas J. Green eds.(New York: The Paulist Press, 2000), Art. I, canon 331; pp. 431–6.

13 Summa Domini Henrici Cardinalis Hostiensis (1250–3), cited from Tierney,Crisis of Church and State, pp. 156–7; Chronicle of Francesco Pipino, cited fromFolz, Concept of Empire, p. 207.

14 The words are drawn from Innocent’s encyclical letter Eger Cui Levia (c. 1246),cited from Tierney, Crisis of Church and State, p. 148.

15 A.M. Hocart, Kingship (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 128.16 Dictatus papae, §8; in Tierney, Crisis of Church and State, p. 49.17 Folz, Concept of Empire, p. 79; cf. pp. 201–3.18 Hobbes, Leviathan, Pt. 4, ch. 47; ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Black-

well, 1946), p. 457.19 Words drawn from the imperialist tract De Unitate Ecclesiae Conservanda

(1090–3), the Letter of Henry to the German bishops (1076), and the Letter ofHenry to Gregory refusing to recognize him as pope (1076) – all cited fromTierney, Crisis of Church and State, pp. 81, 61–2, 59–60.

20 Huguccio, Commentary on Dist. 96, c. 6 (1189–91), cited from Tierney, Crisisof Church and State, pp. 122–3.

21 Thus Kenneth Pennington, Pope and Bishops: A Study of the Papal Monarchy inthe Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania UniversityPress, 1984), p. 41.

22 Otto of Freising, Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, Bk. II, ch. 3; ed. and trans.Charles Christopher Mierow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953),pp. 116–17. For Charles V as deacon, see Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body: SacredRituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, trans. R. Burr Litchfield(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), p. 14.

23 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957) – the whole of ch. 4 “Law-

Notes

178

Centered Kingship” is pertinent to this process. The words cited occur atpp. 185 and 192; also Folz, Concept of Empire, pp. 103, 117–18.

24 Dante, De monarchia, 1:8, 16; 2:8, 12; 3:16; trans. Herbert W. Schneider asDante, On World Government (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957),pp. 10–11, 22–3, 44, 49–51, 79. Also Dante Alighierii Epistolae, ed. PagetToynbee, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), chs. 6 and 7;pp. 67–8, 77, 87, 90–1, 100–1.

25 Robinson, “Church and Papacy,” p. 303.26 I cite St Bernard’s words and those of Grosseteste from J.A. Watt, “Spiritual and

Temporal Powers,” in Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought,pp. 367–423 (at pp. 373 and 388).

27 Ibid., p. 399.28 So claims Bertelli, The King’s Body, p. 26. Extracts from Golein’s treatise are

printed in Appendix 4 to Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le carac-tère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et enAngleterre (Strasburg: Librairie Istra, 1924), pp. 478–89. Claire RichterSherman, The Portraits of Charles V of France 1338–1380 (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 1969), pp. 13–14 and 35, discusses Golein and the pertinentminiatures.

29 See J.H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship, and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy1400–1525 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 109–14.

30 Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the CatholicChurch 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 215–49.

31 Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, De comparatione auctoritate papae et concilii,cum Apologia ejusdem Tractatus, cap. 6; ed. V.M. Pollet (Rome, 1936),pp. 46–7; English translation in J.H. Burns and Thomas M. Izbicki eds., Con-ciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),pp. 25–6. Robert, Cardinal Bellarmine, Risposta ad un libretto intitulato Trat-tato e resolutione sopra la validità de la scommuniche di Gio Gersono (Rome,1606), p. 76.

32 See Francis Oakley, “Edward Foxe, Matthew Paris, and the Royal potestasordinis,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 18 (1987), 347–53.

33 Stephen Gardiner, De vera obedientia/The Oration of True Obedience, in Obediencein Church and State, Pierre Janelle ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1930), D viv, D iiir–iiiv, D ivr–ivv; Richard Taverner, The Second Book of the Gardenof Wysdome (London, 1539), fol. 14; Anon., cited in F.L. Baumer, The EarlyTudor Theory of Kingship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), p. 86.

34 For the remarkable endurance of the intellectual tradition in question, seeOakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, pp. 217–49.

35 John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (New York and London: HarperTorchbooks, 1965), pp. 5–6.

36 Drawing here not only on the speech of 1610 but also on his later “Speech in theStarre-Chamber . . . Anno 1616,” both printed in The Political Works of James I,C. H. McIlwain ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), wordscited at pp. 307–8, 333. What James appears to be doing in these pieces is con-flating the potentia absoluta/ordinaria distinction with an even older scholastic

Notes

179

distinction between the secret and revealed wills of God (voluntas beneplaciti/signi, or, in the Reformed terminology, Secret/Hidden and Revealed Will ofGod. For a detailed analysis of these texts, see Francis Oakley, Omnipotence,Covenant, and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard toLeibniz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 93–118.

37 The numbers in parentheses refer to the pagination of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet,Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, trans. and ed. Patrick Riley(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

38 Stephanus Junius Brutus (ps.), Vindiciae contra tyrannos: or, concerning thelegitimate power of a prince over the people and of the people over a prince, Qu. 3;ed. and trans. George Garnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),pp. 122–9. Cf. 1 Samuel, 8:4–21.

39 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (London, Oxford, New York:Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 12–13.

6 The Fading Nimbus

1 For this, and for the sacrality of the early modern French kingship in general, seeDale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin tothe Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale Univer-sity Press, 1996), esp. pp. 292–3.

2 David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: TheBritish Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’,” in The Invention of Tradi-tion, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, pp. 101–67; and, for the critics, Ian Bradley, God Save the Queen:The Spiritual Dimension of Monarchy (London: Darton, Longman and Todd,2002), pp. 142–3.

3 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (London, New York, Toronto: OxfordUniversity Press, 1928), pp. 35–9.

4 Thus E. Shils and M. Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” SociologicalReview, new ser., 1 (1953), 63–81; critical response by N. Birnbaum, “Monar-chies and Sociologists: A Reply to Professors Shils and Young,” ibid., 3 (1955),5–23. For the development across time of the English coronation rite, see PercyErnst Schramm, A History of the English Coronation, trans. Leopold G. WickhamLegg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937).

5 Thus the theologian Ian Bradley, God Save the Queen, esp. pp. 185 and 87,where he cites Grace Davie’s words from the Church Times, April 14, 2000.

6 Bagehot, The English Constitution, p. 38.7 Following here Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual,”

pp. 101–64 (at pp. 110 and 117).8 Eric Hobsbawm, “Mass-Producing Tradition: Europe, 1870–1914,” in Hobs-

bawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, pp. 263–307 (at p. 282).9 This being the claim made by Gerald Straka, “The Final Phase of Divine Right

Theory in England, 1688–1702,” English Historical Review, 77 (1962), 638–58.10 Bagehot, The English Constitution, pp. 37–8.11 Paul Kléber Monod, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe

Notes

180

1589–1715 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999),pp. 1–31. Subsequent references to this book are given in parentheses in thetext.

12 This being the title of H.R. Trevor-Roper’s contribution to Crisis in Europe,1560–1660, T.H. Aston ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965),pp. 59–95; cf. the general statement at pp. 5–58.

13 Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, no. 24; in Oeuvres complètes de Montesquieu(Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1866–79), vol. 1, pp. 16–17.

14 Jeffrey W. Merrick, Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the EighteenthCentury (Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State University Press,1990), p. 166.

15 Monod, The Power of Kings, pp. 83–5.16 Van Kley, Religious Origins of the French Revolution, p. 12; cf. p. 8, where he

adds: “What outright religious civil war failed to fell in the sixteenth century, reli-gious controversy in an era of public opinion effectively undid in the century oflights.”

17 Thus, e.g. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans.Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1991),esp. pp. 109–35. Cf. Van Kley, Religious Origins of the French Revolution andMerrick, Desacralization of the French Monarchy.

18 The words are drawn (in order), from Chartier, pp. 123, 134, 118, 120; Merrick,pp. 167, 26 (cf. pp. 24–5); Van Kley, pp. 129, 294, 392; Robert Darnton, TheLiterary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 1982), esp. pp. 202–5; idem, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-RevolutionaryFrance (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1995), esp. pp. 198–246.

19 Chartier, Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, p. 113; cf. Van Kley, Reli-gious Origins of the French Revolution, p. 292.

20 Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and EarlyModern Europe, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (University Park, PA: PennsylvaniaState University Press, 2001), pp. 267–9.

21 Ibid., p. 269.22 Echoing here the distinction which William J. Bouwsma framed in “Christian

Adulthood,” Daedalus (Spring, 1976), 72–92 (at 77); and Peter Berger, TheSacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY:Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 105–25 (words quoted at p. 124; cf.pp. 110–12).

23 Berger, The Sacred Canopy, p. 111.24 Ibid., p. 110.25 Brian Tierney, “Medieval Canon Law and Western Constitutionalism,” Catholic

Historical Review, 52, 1 (1966), 7–8.26 Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1967), pp. 84 §124, 124§185; cf. pp. 51§62, 133§206, 195§299, and267–8, Add. 118; G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction tothe Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (New York: Liberal ArtsPress, 1953), pp. 23–4; idem, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibrec (New York:The Colonial Press, 1899), pp. 379, 412.

Notes

181

27 See the essays gathered together in Creation: The Impact of an Idea, DanielO’Connor and Francis Oakley eds. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969).

28 Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. OliveWyon, 2 vols. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), vol. I, pp. 331–43,378–82; vol. II, pp. 461–5, 656–65.

29 Ibid.30 Harry Höpfl and Marilyn P. Thompson, “The History of Contract as a Motif in

Political Thought,” American Historial Review, 94 (1979), 919–44 (at p. 938).31 John Lilburne, Regall Tyrannie Discovered (London, 1647), pp. 6–7; Richard

Overton, An Arrowe Against All Tyrants and Tyranny, October 12, 1646; citedfrom the section printed in The Levellers in the English Revolution, G.E. Aylmered. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 68–9.

32 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: MeridianBooks, 1976).

33 Plato, Timaeus §34B, translated in F.M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: TheTimaeus of Plato (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, nd.), p. 58; Aristotle, Metaphysics12:10; ed. and trans. W.D. Ross, The Works of Aristotle Translated into English,12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908–52), vol. 12, p. 1074b, 1–15.

34 Thus Étienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (NewYork: Random House, 1955), p. 498.

35 Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly receiv’d Notion of Nature, in TheWorks of the Honorable Robert Boyle, Thomas Birch ed., 6 vols. (London, 1772),vol. 5, pp. 163–4.

36 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945).37 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Michael Oakeshott ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

1946), Editor’s Introduction, pp. xx–xxi, xxvi–ix, xliv–vi, lii–lv.38 Leviathan, Pt. 4, ch. 45; in ibid., p. 435.

Epilogue

1 Sandra Barnes, “Political Ritual and the Public Sphere in Contemporary WestAfrica,” in The Politics of Cultural Performance, D. Parkin, L. Caplan, andH. Fisher eds. (Oxford: Berghan, 1996), pp. 19–40 (at pp. 20–1); cf. MichelleGilbert, “The Person of the King: Ritual Power in a Ghanaian State,” in Ritualsof Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, David Cannadine andSimon Price eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 298–330.

2 Lumen gentium, cap. 3, §22; in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, GiuseppeAlberigo and Norman Tanner, eds., 2 vols. (London and Washington, DC: Sheedand Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 2, pp. 866–7; cf. Notaexplicativa praevia, ibid., pp. 899–900.

3 Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower(New York: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 112–13, 120–1. Judicious discussion ofCamus’s position and of the multiple French interpretations of the regicide inSusan Dunn, The Death of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagina-tion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Notes

182

Suggestions for Further Reading

183

Al-Azmeh, Aziz, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian andPagan Polities (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1997).

Anderson, Thornton, Russian Political Thought: An Introduction (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1967).

Arquillière, H.-X., L’Augustinisme politique, 2nd edn. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955).Bendix, Reinhard, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley, Los

Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978).Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion

(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969).Bertelli, Sergio, The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early

Modern Europe, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, 2001).

Binchy, D.A., Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).Black, Antony, The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present

(New York: Routledge, 2001).Bloch, Marc, Les Rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la

puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Strasburg: LibrairieIstra, 1924).

Bradley, Ian, God Save the Queen: The Spiritual Dimension of Monarchy (London:Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002).

Burns, J.H., Lordship, Kingship, and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy 1400–1525(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

Cannadine, David, and Price, Simon, eds., Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonialin Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Chaney, William A., The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transitionfrom Paganism to Christianity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970).

Claessen, Henri J.M., and Skalnik, Peter, eds., The Early State (The Hague, Paris,New York: Mouton Publishers, 1978).

Crone, Patricia, God’s Rule: Six Centuries of Islamic Political Thought (New York:Columbia University Press, 2004).

Dunn, Susan, The Death of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Dvornik, Francis, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins andBackground, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for ByzantineStudies, 1966).

Eliade, Mircea, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York:Harper and Row, 1959).

Figgis, John Neville, The Divine Right of Kings (New York and London: HarperTorchbooks, 1965).

Folz, Robert, The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the FourteenthCentury, trans. Sheila Ann Ogilvie (New York and Evanston, IL: Harper and Row,1969).

Frankfort, Henri, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Near Eastern Religion as the Inte-gration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).

Fujitani, T., Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley,Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996).

Fustel de Coulanges, Numa D., The Ancient City, trans. Willard Small, 12th edn.(Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955).

Gauchet, Marcel, The Disenchantment of the World, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Geertz, Clifford, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Hocart, A.M., Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy ofHuman Society, ed. Rodney Needham (Chicago and London: University of Chi-cago Press, 1970).

Hooke, S.H. ed., Myth, Ritual and Kingship: Essays on the Theory and Practice ofKingship in the Ancient Near East and in Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).

Kantorowicz, Ernst, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).

Klaniczay, Gábor, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in MedievalCentral Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Merrick, Jeffrey W., Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century(Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

Monod, Paul Kléber, The Power of Kings: Monarchy and Religion in Europe1589–1715 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999).

Mousnier, Roger, Monarchies et royautés de la préhistoires à nos jours (Paris: LibrairieAcadémique Perrin, 1989).

Nelson, Janet L., The Frankish World 790–900 (London and Rio Grande: The Hamble-don Press, 1996).

Oakley, Francis, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Suggestions for Further Reading

184

Schele, Linda, and Freidel, David, A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the AncientMaya (New York: William Morrow, 1990).

The Sacral Kingship: Contributions to the Central Theme of the VIIIth InternationalCongress for the History of Religions, Rome, April, 1955 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1959).

Van Kley, Dale K., The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to theCivil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UniversityPress, 1996).

Voegelin, Eric, Order and History: I Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge, LA:Louisiana State University Press, 1956).

Wallace-Hadrill, J.M., Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

Williams, George H., The Norman Anonymous of 1100 AD. Toward the Identificationand Evaluation of the So-Called Anonymous of York (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1951).

Suggestions for Further Reading

185

’Abba-sid ascendancy 63, 64Abrahamic unease: Israelite monarchy 50–7

Christian reaction 57–63Islamic “political” tradition 63–7

accession ceremonies 14, 20–2, 42see also coronation ceremonies

Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) 126Act of Settlement (1701) 136Afghanistan 160Africa 11, 13, 23–7Akihito, Crown Prince of Japan 20Alanus Anglicus 116Albania 159Albert of Hapsburg 116Alcuin 90, 93Alemanni tribe 87Alexander III, Tsar 159Alexander the Great 8, 47Ambrose of Milan, St 77, 89Ambrosiaster 102, 106ancien régime 163Ancient Near East 8, 44, 45, 54, 64, 65

cosmic religiosity and sacral kingship 16,17

Eygpt and Mesopotamia 38–43Israelite monarchy 51, 52, 53, 54, 57ubiquity, longevity and sacrality of kingship

10–11Angles 87Anglicans 148Anglo-Saxons 89, 92–9, 100, 133Anne, Queen of England 136anointing see unctionAnonymous of York 101, 103–7, 110, 122,

134Ante-Nicene period 76Antonius IV, Patriarch of Constantinople

82–3

Apostolic Age 58Aquinas, Thomas 154archaic and global patterns of cosmic kingship

10–43Ancient Near East: Eygpt and

Mesopotamia 38–43cosmic religiosity and sacral kingship

14–19East Asia: Imperial Japan 19–23Equatorial Africa: Kingdom of Kuba

23–7Mesoamerica: Maya Kingship of Classic

Period 27–33ubiquity, longevity and sacrality 10–14

Arianism 88Aristotelianism 155Aristotle 46, 150–3, 156Arquillière, H.-X. 91, 98, 114Ashanti 23Asia:

east 19–23Minor 45north-east 14, 33, 160south 11south-east 11see also Ancient Near East

Assyria/Assyrians 13, 50Athanasius, St 77Athens/Athenians 4, 47, 150, 153, 154,

456Augustine, St 69, 89–90, 91, 92, 98–9, 100,

107, 114, 152Augustus Caesar 48, 49Austria, Empress of 159Austro-Hungarian empire 159axis mundi (hub of the world) 16, 31, 34Al-Azmeh, Aziz 64Aztec monarchy 11

Index

186

Babylon/Babylonians 42, 50, 52, 53, 57Bagehot, W. 133, 134, 136Bali, kingdom 13Baynes, N.H. 79–80Becket, Thomas à 121Belgium 159, 160Belize 28Bellarmine, Cardinal 125Bemba kings 12Benin 11, 23Berger, P. 143–4Bernard of Clairvaux, St 121Bertelli, S. 142Beskow, P. 72Bhutan 160Binchy, D.A. 34Bloch, M. 92, 97, 106Boniface VIII, Pope 96, 116, 117, 121Bossuet, J.-B. 129, 130, 139Bourbon dynasty 158Boyle, R. 155Brazil 158Britain 20, 87, 134–5, 158, 160

see also England; Ireland; ScotlandBuchanan, G. 127Bulgaria 159, 160Burgundians 87Bushoon chiefdom 25Byzantium 85, 88, 89, 91, 106, 107

basileus 76–83

Cajetan, Cardinal 125caliph 65, 66Calvinists/Calvinism 124, 126, 127, 128,

132, 144, 146Cambodia 160Cambridge Platonists 155Camus, Albert 161, 163Canaan 11, 50, 51, 56Cannadine, D. 132–3Carolingian era 92–9, 100, 109Catalonia 138Catholic League 127, 137, 141, 146Catholics/Catholicism 93, 128, 161, 163

de-mystification of monarchy and crisis oflegitimacy 136, 140

desacralization of kingship 143, 144, 146,154

divine right of kings 131kingship in France and England 127Nicene 88see also Catholic League

Cathwulf 100, 103Celtic peoples 13, 147Central Africa 25Central Asia 3, 11, 14Central Europe 11, 88

Cerros, Maya kingdom 31–2Chadwick, H.M. 14Chan-Bahlum, King of Palenque 32Charlemagne, Emperor 88, 90, 91, 95, 98,

100, 111, 119Charles I, King of England 124, 131, 137,

142Charles II, King of England 136, 138Charles V, Emperor 119, 122Charles X, King of France 158–9Charleton, W. 155Chartier, A. 141Cherniavsky, M. 84Childerich III, Merovingian king 95–6Ch’in period, China 11China 11, 14, 16, 17Chingis Khan 12, 84Christian/Christianity 8–9, 44, 50, 108, 109,

110, 161, 162–3Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian

kingship 92–4, 95, 96, 97de-mystification of monarchy and crisis of

legitimacy 140desacralization of kingship 143, 144, 145,

146–7, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155imperial sacrality 120kingship in France and England 126Latin 89in medieval north Africa 92modern kingship 132monarchy, transition to in Rome 69–76“political Augustinianism” 89, 90, 91political vision 57reaction to Israelite monarchy 57–63

Christocentrism 99, 100–7Chromatianos, D. 79Cicero 48Cistercian spirituality 148City of God (St Augustine) 90Clement of Alexandria 72, 74, 81Clement VII, Pope 119clericalization 99, 100Cochrane, C.N. 48Code of Canon Law 115Constantine, Roman Emperor 68–9, 74,

75–6, 79, 81, 112Constantius II, Roman Emperor 77Coronation Book of Charles V 122coronation ceremonies 14, 20–2, 39, 42, 47,

85, 99, 100–1, 104–6, 114, 119, 122,133–4, 135, 139, 162

see also accession ceremonies; Edgar ordo;initiation rites

cosmic kingship see archaic and globalpatterns of cosmic kingship

Coulanges, Numa Denis Fustel de 7, 61Council of Basel 124, 125

Index

187

Council of Constance 123–4Council of Nicaea 76Cowell, J. 129creation myths

ancient Egypt 39, 42, 45ancient Greece 45, 151Enûma Elish 42, 45, 54, 151Genesis 42, 53-4, 56Hebrew 53, 56Maya 30–1Mesopotamia/Babylon 42, 45, 54, 151Sumerian 42Timaeus (Plato) 45, 151, 152

Crete 11, 45

daijo--sai (Japanese accession ceremony) 20,22

Dante 120, 152Darnton, R. 141David, biblical king 50

House of David 57Davidic kingship 97de-mystification of European monarchy see

modern kingshipdeities

ancient Egypt 38, 39, 42ancient Ireland 34Japan 22Kuba 26Mesopotamia 38, 42

Demiurge 151, 152, 153democracy 3Denmark 160al-Din Barani, Dhiya’ 65Diocletian, Roman Emperor 48, 68–9, 87Dionysus 46divine right of kings 126, 128–31“do nothing” kings 12–13, 95–6Dominicans 146dominus 69“Donation of Constantine” 112, 117dual kingship 13

early medieval Western Europe 12, 89–91early Middle Ages 92–9East Asia 19–23Eastern Europe 3, 11Eastern Mediterranean 10, 45Edgar ordo 20, 104, 106, 133–4Edward VIII, King of England 160Egypt 8, 10, 11, 13, 16, 38–43, 45, 50, 51,

52, 66, 159coronation rites 39, 42deities

Einhard, biographer of Charlemagne 91El Salvador 28Eliade, M. 16, 45, 151

Elizabeth I, Queen of England 125, 133Elizabeth II, Queen of England 20, 135

coronation 133–4, 135Elizabethan religious settlement 127England 11, 97, 99, 100, 101, 121–8, 138

coronation rites 20, 104–6, 133–4, 135de-mystification of monarchy and crisis of

legitimacy 137desacralization of kingship 142, 148Hellenists 6modern kingship 132

Enlightenment 139, 141, 154, 155Equatorial Africa: Kingdom of Kuba 23–7Ethiopia 13, 160Eugenius IV, Pope 124Eurasia 17Europe 5, 11, 12, 13, 20

de-mystification of monarchy and crisis oflegitimacy 133–42, 136, 137

desacralization of monarchy 143, 144, 155Eastern 3, 11and Equatorial Africa 23modern kingship 132see also Germanic successor kingdoms of

Western Europe; Western EuropeEusebian:

accommodation 89, 92, 126fashion 105imperial ideology 87patterns of Christological thinking 154tradition 120version of Hellenistic philosophy 106, 150vision 91

Eusebius 70, 72–7, 78, 79–81, 85, 86, 90,103, 107

Fa-timid caliphate 66Ferdinand II, Emperor 140Figgis, J.N. 5, 128Filmer, Sir Robert 128–9First Civil War 148First Vatican Council 158France 11, 99, 101, 121–8, 158, 163

coronation ceremonies 139de-mystification of monarchy and crisis of

legitimacy 136, 138, 139, 141modern kingship 132see also French

Franciscans 148Frankfort, H. 17, 42Franks 12, 88, 89, 92, 95, 96, 97Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 159Frederick I (Barbarossa), Emperor 118, 119Frederick II, Emperor 115, 118, 119–20,

138–9Freidel, D. 29French Religious Wars 127, 128, 137

Index

188

French Revolution 161Fronde 128Frondeurs 138Fujiwara dynasty, Japan 22

Gardiner, S. 126Gassendi, P. 155Gaul 87Geertz, C. 13Gelasius I, Pope 77–9, 105, 113, 114, 118George I, King of England 134, 136George II, King of England 134George III, King of England 134George IV, King of England 134George V, King of England 136Germanic kings 12Germanic successor kingdoms of Western

Europe 87–107Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian

kingship 92–9Christocentric or liturgical kingship

100–7divine right of kings 128–31imperial sacrality 117–20papal monarchy 110–17“political Augustinianism” and sacral

monarchy 89–91Germany 13, 99, 100, 118, 126, 127, 159

coronation ceremonies 100emperors 122empire 158Hellenists 6paganism 147

Ghana 23global patterns see archaic and global patterns

of cosmic kingshipGlorious Revolution 136God 74, 103, 104, 108, 162

Byzantine basileus 77, 80, 81Christocentric or “liturgical” kingship 100de-mystification of kingship and crisis of

legitimacy 138, 139, 141desacralization of kingship 146, 149–50,

152, 155, 156divine right of kings 128, 130, 131imperial sacrality, fate of 118, 119, 120kingship in France and England 122, 126transition at Rome to Christian monarchy

73–4Gogol, Nikolai 86Golein, J. 122Gratian 118Graves, Robert 49Great Schism of the West 123Greece 5, 8, 11, 12, 45–7, 159, 160

desacralization of kingship 150–1, 152,154, 155–6

see also Athens/Athenians; Crete; Hellenisticperiod/Hellenization

Gregorian reformers 119, 121, 122, 144Gregory I, Pope 89, 94, 111Gregory IV, Pope 90Gregory VII, Pope 92, 110, 112, 113,

114–15, 118Gregory IX, Pope 117Grosseteste, Robert, Bishop of Lincoln 121Guatemala 28Gunthram, King 93Gustav Wasa, King of Sweden 35

Habsburg states 136hadı-th 63, 64al-Ha-kim bin Amr Alla-h, Caliph 66–7Han period, China 11Hasmonean kings 56, 58healing power of kings 93–4, 122, 136, 139,

140Hebrews see Judaism/HebrewsHegel, G.W.F. 131, 143, 147Hellenistic period/Hellenization 13, 44,

47–9Byzantine basileus 78, 81Christocentric or “liturgical” kingship 106desacralization of kingship 150Empire of Alexander the Great 8imperial sacrality 119–20kings 48, 60philosophy of kingship 62, 63, 68, 69, 70,

71, 72, 75, 76, 86, 99sacrality of kingship 45–50see also Alexander the Great; Greece

Hellenists 6Henry II, King of England 121Henry III, Emperor 111, 131, 137, 142Henry IV, Emperor 111, 112, 113, 115, 118,

128, 131, 137, 142Henry VI, King of England 124Henry VII, Emperor 120Henry VIII, King of England 126, 127Hilary, St 77Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims 109Hirohito, Emperor of Japan 19, 21Hittite empire 36, 50Hobbes, Thomas 117, 149, 156–7Hobsbawm, Eric 7Hocart, A.M. 17, 36Höfler, O. 37Hohenstaufen dynasty 118Holland see United ProvincesHoltom, D.C. 22Holy Land 111Holy Roman Emperors 158

Charlemagne 88, 90, 91, 95, 98, 100,111, 119

Index

189

Charles V 119, 122coronation ceremonies 99, 119, 122Ferdinand II 140Frederick I (Barbarossa) 118, 119Frederick II 115, 118, 119–20, 138–9Henry III 111, 131, 137, 142Henry IV 111, 112, 113, 115, 118, 128,

131, 137, 142Henry VII 120Hohenstaufen dynasty 118Leo III 79Louis the Pious 90Merovingian dynasty 12, 95–6Otto III 101, 102, 111

Homeric kings 12, 45–6Honduras 28Hostiensis 116, 130Hugh of Fleury 103Huguccio of Pisa 118Huguenots 127, 137Humbert of Silva Candida, Cardinal 112,

113Hundred Years’ War 123

imperial sacrality 117–20Inca monarchy 11, 12India 13, 34, 136Industrial Revolution 4, 10Ine, King of Wessex 98initiation rites 34, 96–7Innocent III, Pope 116, 117, 118, 121Innocent IV, Pope 112, 115, 116Iran 65, 66

Shah of Iran 64Iraq 160Ireland 33, 34, 37, 137Isidore of Seville 94–5Islam/Muslims 8–9, 44, 88

“political” tradition 63–7see also Sharı-’a; Shı-’ite; Sunni; ’ulama-;

ummaIsma’il, Shah, Safavid monarch 66Israel 50, 52, 53, 97Israelites 96, 108

dependence under Hasmonean kings 58divine right of kings 131inauguration ceremonies 96kingship 50–7, 95penetration into Canaan 56

Italy 87, 88, 99, 125, 158, 159see also Naples

Ivan III, Tsar of Russia 84–5Ivan IV, Tsar of Russia 83–4

Jacobean religious settlement 127James I, King of England 127, 128, 129–30James II, King of England 136, 138

James VI, King of Scotland see James IJames, E.O. 46James of Viterbo 115Jansenists 124, 140, 141Japan 11, 12, 13, 16, 19–23, 158, 160

coronation rites 20–2Jerusalem 50, 150, 153, 154Jesuits 127, 140, 146Jesus Christ 121, 122, 144

Abrahamic unease: Christian reaction58–9, 60, 62, 63

Byzantine basileus 77, 81Christocentric or “liturgical” kingship 100,

103, 104imperial sacrality 118, 120kingship 100, 103, 104transition in Rome to Christian monarchy

70–2, 75, 76Jimmu, Emperor of Japan 19Johannes Teutonicus 118John Chrysostom, St 77John, King of England 121John Paul II, Pope 161Jordan 160Juan Carlos, King of Spain 160Judah 50, 52, 56, 57Judaism/Hebrews 8–9, 12, 44, 50–7, 96, 150

Byzantine basileus 81desacralization of kingship 150, 151, 152,

154messianism 72modern kingship 133

Julius Caesar 48Jungian commentators on kingship 18Justinian, Roman Emperor 79–81, 87Jutes 87

kami (Japanese ancestral deities) 19, 22Kamikura shogunate 12Kantorowicz, E. 97, 101, 106, 119–20Kap aNgaam (Kuba nature spirit) 26Khumainı-, Ayatulla-h Ruh-Alla-h 64Kierkegaard, Soren 54Kingdom of Christ 105Kingdom of God 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 76

Byzantine basileus 80Christocentric or “liturgical” Israelite

monarchy 56, 57kingship 105, 106, 107“political Augustinianism” 90

Kingdom of Heaven 56Korea 11Kuba, Kingdom of 23–7

Laos 160Latin America 3Latin Christians 89

Index

190

legitimacy, crisis of see modern kingshipLeo I, Pope 77, 111Leo III, Emperor 79Leo IX, Pope 111, 112Leopold, King of Belgium 160Levelers 148–9Libya 160Lilburne, John 148–9liturgical kingship 100–7Locke, John 149logos 70–6Lombards 88, 95longevity of kingship 10–14Louis the Pious, Emperor 90Louis XIII, King of France 138Louis XIV, King of France 13, 137, 138, 139Louis XV, King of France 140Louis XVI, King of France 132, 140, 141–2,

161, 163Luke, St: Lukan tradition 73, 120Lutherans 126

Maistre, Joseph de 115mana 37Manegold of Lautenbach 114Marcellinus, Ammianus 37marginalization of kingship 4Marlowe, Christopher 12Martin V, Pope 123Matoon dynasty, Kuba 23Maxentius 74Maya 11, 16, 27–33Mazarin, Cardinal 128Mbop Mábíínc maMbéky, King of Kuba 27medieval period 6, 12, 78–125Mediterranean region 10, 44, 45Meiji restoration, Japan 19, 20, 23Melchizedek, King 77, 81, 97, 104Melito of Sardis 73Merovingian dynasty 12, 95–6Mesoamerica 11, 13, 16, 17, 27–33Mesopotamia 10, 16, 38–43, 51

see also Babylon/Babylonians; IraqMessianic kingdom 57–8, 59Mexico 28, 158military role of kings 11–12ministerial character of kingship 109Minoans 11, 45Mishe miShyaang maMbul, King of Kuba 24modern kingship 132–57

change 142–57in Britain 135–6, 138in France 136–7, 138–42in Holland 138in Italy 138in Scandinavia 136in Spain 138

de-mystification of European monarchyand crisis of legitimacy 133–42Anglicans 148Calvinism 144, 146Catholicism 143–4, 146Christianity 143–7, 151–5Dominicans 146Franciscans 148Gregorian reform 144Hellenism 150–6Islam 151Jesuits 146Judaism 150–4Levelers 148–9paganism 147Protestant Reformation 143, 145–8Puritans 148

Neoplatonism 152–3, 155monarchy:

definition 1–2and kingship, distinction between 2

Mongols 14, 84monocracy, definition 1–2Monod, P.K. 136–40Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de

139Morocco 160Moses 97Mousnier, R. 2Mowinckel, S. 53, 55Muhammad 63–4, 65Mycenaeans 11, 12, 45, 46

Naples 137, 138Napoleon I, Emperor of France 158Nara era, Japan 22Nelson, J. 109Neolithic revolution 4, 10Neoplatonism 152–3, 155Nepal 13, 160New Testament 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63,

110Byzantine basileus 78Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian

kingship 95, 99Christocentric or “liturgical” kingship 104,

107desacralization of kingship 144, 146imperial sacrality 119modern kingship 132papal monarchy 113–14“political Augustinianism” 89, 90, 91transition at Rome to Christian monarchy

69, 70, 71, 74Newton, Sir Isaac 155ngesh (Kuba nature-spirits) 26Nicholas I, Pope 90, 111

Index

191

Nicholas II, Pope 113, 142Nilotic Sudan 23North Africa 87, 88North America 3north-east Asia 14Norway 33, 160

Oakeshott, M. 1, 156Octavian see Augustus CaesarOld Testament 52, 53, 54, 56

Byzantine basileus 81Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian

kingship 96, 97desacralization of kingship 143divine right of kings 130imperial sacrality 119kingship in France and England 126modern kingship 132“political Augustinianism” 91transition in Rome to Christian monarchy

71, 74Olmec monarchy 11Origen 72, 73, 81, 153Ostrogoths 87, 88, 92Otto III, Emperor 101, 102, 111Otto of Freising 119Ottoman Empire 64, 123, 159Ottonian rulers 92–9, 100Overton, R. 148–9

Pacal, King of Palenque 32Palenque kingdom 31–2pankuš (Hittite assembly of nobles) 36papal monarchy 110–17, 160–1

coronation rites 162patriot constitutionalists in eighteenth-

century France 124–5Paul, St 62, 111, 126Paul VI, Pope 115, 161, 162Pepin the Short, King of the Franks 95–6Persia 13, 64Peru 11Peter the apostle, St 111Peter Damiani, St 100, 101Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia 83–4Pharaohs 8, 11, 13, 38Pharisees 58, 60Philip IV, King of France 118, 121, 145Philo of Alexandria 70–1, 74, 81, 150,

151Philo Judaeus 72, 152Pier da Monte 124Pius V, Pope 125Plato 45–6, 150–3Platonists 155Poland 123, 137, 159polis 6

political Augustinianism 89–91political thinking 6Polynesia 11Ponet, J. 127Portugal 123, 137, 159“premodern” 14–15“primitive” 14–15princeps 69Procopius 37Protestant Reformation 95, 110, 126, 127,

128desacralization of kingship 143, 145, 146,

147, 148Protestants/Protestantism 128

de-mystification of monarchy and crisis oflegitimacy 136, 137, 141

desacralization of kingship 146, 148divine right of kings 131see also Protestant Reformation

Pu Yi, Emperor of China 158Puritans/Puritanism 124, 127, 148

Qur’a-n 63, 64, 142

Radical Reformation 148Reformation see Protestant Reformation;

Radical Reformationregalia 13, 20, 22, 27, 84, 85, 112, 115, 117,

161, 162Richard II, King of England 122–3Robespierre, Maximilien 142Romania 159Rome/Roman 47

classical world 8Empire 33, 38, 87, 88kings 49law and imperial sacrality 119proconsuls 48provenance 99sacrality 45–50and transition to Christian monarchy

69–76understanding of imperial office 68

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 61Royal Law 1665 139Russia 83–6, 89, 137, 159

sacrality 10–14Sadducees 58, 60Safavid empire 64, 66Salian rulers 99, 100Saravia, H. 129Sarpi, P. 125Saudi Arabia 160Saul, biblical king 50Saxons 87, 89, 99

see also Anglo-Saxons

Index

192

Scandinavia/Scandinavians 13, 34–5, 37,126, 136

Schele, L. 29Schlesinger, W. 14Scotland 33, 137Second Vatican Council 161senso (Japanese accession ceremony) 20Shakespeare, William 123Shang dynasty 11Sharı-’a 66Shı-’ite community 66Shilluk kingdom 11, 23Shils, E. 134shoguns 12Shyaam a Mbul a Ngong, King of Kuba 23,

24, 26Soga dynasty, Japan 22sokui-rei (Japanese accession ceremony) 20Solomon, biblical king 50South America 11, 12South Asia 11South-east Asia 11Spain 87, 88, 94, 97, 137, 146, 159, 160Sparta 13Stephen III, Pope 100Stevenson, Adlai 4Stoics 71sub-Saharan Africa 11, 13Suevi tribe 87sultan 65Sumerians 10, 38, 42sun symbolism 13Sunni community 65, 66Swaziland 11, 160Sweden 33, 160Sylvester I, Pope 112symphonia 80, 85Syria/Syrians 11, 50

Tanganyika (Tanzania) 11, 12Tara court, Ireland 34Tatar rule 84Taverner, R. 126tenth century 100–7terrestrial structures: mirroring cosmic

prototypes 16Thailand 160“theatre state” 13Themistius 73Theodosius the Great, Roman emperor 79,

87Tierney, B. 144Timur 12Tokugawa shogunate 12, 22Toltec monarchy 11Tonga 13

Toynbee, A. 83–4Turkic peoples 14Tutankhamun, Pharaoh 40

ubiquity of kingship 10–14Uganda 11Ukraine 137’ulama- 63, 64Ullmann, W. 6Umayyad ascendancy 63, 64umma 65unction 96–7, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 105,

106, 109, 114, 117, 118, 119, 122,123, 134

United Nations 2United Provinces 138, 160

Van Kley, D. 140–1Vandals 87, 88Vansina, J. 23Victoria, Queen 134–5Vietnam 18Visigoths 87, 88, 92, 94–5, 97Vladimir I, prince of Kiev 85Vladimir II, prince of Kiev 85

Wallace-Hadrill, J.M. 14Walwyn, W. 148Weber, M. 9, 132, 137West Africa 23, 160Western Europe 7, 11, 83, 111Wido of Osnabrück 100William II, Prince of Orange 138William III, King of England 136William IV, King of England 134William of Ockham 155–6Williams, G. 103, 105Windsor, House of 134Wipo (historian) 101World Maker see DemiurgeWycliffe, J. 122

Yahweh 53, 55–8, 150Yahwist religion 54, 108–9, 132Yasuhiro, N. 19Yemen 160Yorubaland 11Young, M. 134Yucatan peninsula 28Yugoslavia 159

Zaire see KubaZealots 58, 60Zeno, Roman Emperor 77Zeus 73Zhukovsky, V. 86

Index

193